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CRITICAL
‘THEN DRAW THE CURTAINES AGAINE’: THE STRANGE
CASE OF GOOD DUKE HUMPHREY (OF WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE’S HENRY VI, PART TWO)
Dr. Filip Krajnik, Durham University
Filip Krajník has recently gained his PhD in English Literature at Durham University (UK). The topic of his
dissertation is the dramatic rôles of sleep and dreams in Shakespeare’s plays; among his research interests is
the social, intellectual and cultural history of dreaming from antiquity to the early-modern period. He has also
translated a number of English and American works of fiction into Czech and is a lecturer in literary translation
at the English Department at Palacký University, Olomouc (Czech Republic).
ABSTRACT
The image of a sleeping character on stage had a special dramatic significance for mediaeval and early-modern
playwrights and audiences, often playing a crucial rôle in the dramaturgical plane of the play in question.
William Shakespeare seems to have been particularly fond of this trope, having used it numerous times
throughout his dramatic career. The present paper discusses the very first instance of the topos in
Shakespeare’s canon – the murder of Duke Humphrey in his bed in 2 Henry VI. Special attention is paid to two
distinct versions of the scene (Quarto and Folio), whose relationship has not been unanimously agreed upon by
literary criticism. The author argues that, while the Quarto version seems to be the original work of early
Shakespeare, the Folio variant is dramatically superior and more consistent with the use of the topos in
Shakespeare’s later – and more mature – works.
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When, at the beginning of the last scene of Othello, the eponymous protagonist, with a lamp in his hand,
approaches the bed in his own bedroom and draws back its curtain, he stays petrified for a moment and the
dramatic action of the play temporarily ceases. He had expected – even desired – to find what he has just found,
yet the view fills him with almost sacred awe and makes him once more question the intention with which he
came. The flow of dramatic time has, as it were, stopped, and the audience is left to observe how Othello, having
exchanged rage for scopophilic lust, observes his wife (and victim-to-be), Desdemona. The inner dilemma
which Othello has to resolve within the limited space of twenty-two lines of his soliloquy (and Desdemona’s
sleep) is no less grave than the dilemma pervading the entire plot of the play: the way from ‘Yet I’ll not shed her
blood’ (V.2.3) to ‘Yet she must die’ (V.2.6) is just as arduous as the way from the affectionate ‘Excellent wretch’
(III.3.91) to the hateful ‘lewd minx’ (III.3.478), as he calls Desdemona at various stages of the ‘temptation
scene,’ the longest scene of the piece. 1 The beginning of the bedroom scene, therefore, becomes a means of reenacting
the whole conflict of the play before it can finally be resolved. When Othello finally announces that
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