Deception in Shakespeare's Plays | Hugh Dickinson (essay date 1961)
Hugh Dickinson (essay date 1961)
SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Henry Yea and Nay," in Drama Critique, Vol. IV, No. 2, May, 1961, pp. 68-72.
[In the essay below, Dickinson studies the way in which King Henry, of the Henry VI plays, deceives himself into thinking that he is a capable ruler. The critic demonstrates that this self-deception is maintained until the King's impulsive and inconsistent actions reveal his weak will.]
Scholarship and criticism, once less than kind to Shakespeare's youthful effort, the trilogy of Henry VI, have finally come to regard it as a little more than kin. With his authorship now accepted for most of it, if not all, the critical stature of the dramatic chronicle has also risen beyond its former dismal level as a subject for graduate study only. Best of all, it was the theater that in the last decade rescued Henry VI from the limbo of plays unplayable and unproduced. It did so in England when the...
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