Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 (Vol. 56) - F. W. Brownlow (essay date 1977)
F. W. Brownlow (essay date 1977)
SOURCE: “The First Part of King Henry the Sixth,” in Two Shakespearean Sequences: Henry VI to Richard II and Pericles to Timon of Athens, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977, pp. 15-25.
[In the essay below, Brownlow examines 1 Henry VI, considering both its flaws and its theatrical power.]
The series of histories comprising the three parts of Henry VI and The Life and Death of Richard III begins with the death of Henry V and deals with the loss of his French conquests and the coming of civil war during his son Henry VI's reign; it ends with Henry Tudor's invasion, his defeat of Richard III, and the inauguration of a new order under the family of Tudor. The plays cover sixty-three complicated years from 1422 to 1485, and the general theory under which the dramatist arranged his materials was familiar because it provided a well-publicised case for the Tudors' legitimacy....
[The entire page is 4994 words long]
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