Henry VI to Richard III

Critical debates on the Henry VI–Richard III plays have largely centered on issues of design. Were they planned as a sequence or only assembled as such in the First Folio after a more adventitious theatrical creation? Were the Henry VI plays written in chronological order, 1,2,3, or was 1 Henry VI a prequel to the earlier diptych First part of the Contention and True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York? Was the series planned and written by Shakespeare alone or in collaboration with others? There have been fashions and trends in this scholarship as in everything else, which can be charted in the successive Arden editions of the Henry VI plays. The first Arden editor, H.C. Hart, in 1909 was a disintegrationist, attributing much of 1 Henry VI to Shakespearean collaborators, while by 1962 Andrew Cairncross argued strongly for a solo-designed integrated series of Wagnerian Ring proportions. Both Edward Burns and Ronald Knowles, editors respectively of the third-series Arden editions of 1 Henry VI and 2 Henry VI, followed the lead of the Oxford editors, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, in returning to the concept of concept of collaborative authorship and 2,3,1 order of composition. I have advanced my own position elsewhere and do not intend to rehearse here again my reasons for believing that the plays were written in chronological order and, even if 1 Henry VI was a collaborative work, the structural design for the series was Shakespeare’s. ¹ My most controversial conviction is that, whatever their origins, the four plays, once written, would have been played by Shakespeare’s company as a sequential series and that it is to this that the Epilogue of Henry V gestures with the reference to the disastrous reign of Henry VI ‘which oft our stage hath shown’. ² In so far as this essay is based on such an assumption, I need to comment briefly on why scholars have been so unwilling to entertain that possibility.