The ploy worked: Thomas Nashe reported that “ten thousand spectators” were reduced to tears by the death of the heroic English soldier Talbot in Part I, while the playwright Robert Greene was so discomfited by Shakespeare’s success that he parodied a line from Part III to undermine him (“an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his / Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde / … is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene”). His answer to the nationalistic history plays staged by the Queen’s Men, a touring troupe of the late 1580s, was also an attempt to trump Christopher Marlowe’s two-part Tamburlaine the Great (c1588). Part I possibly followed as a prequel the same year.
He may have begun with the script initially known as The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster ( Part II) and The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke ( Part III), both of which were on stage by 1592. Though they depict historical events that come after Henry IV Parts I and II and Henry V, the Henry VIs were composed earlier, possibly when Shakespeare was in his mid 20s.
Joe Armstrong, right, as Hotspur in Henry IV Part I. The three Henry VI plays were Shakespeare ’s first big hits So here are five useful facts about the plays. Navigating the Henry VI plays, with their multiplying Warwicks and Worcesters, Somersets and Shrewsburys, is like taking a tour through minor English cathedral cities by means of Blackadder and 1066 and All That. They haven’t been seen on the Beeb since the woebegone Complete Works series of the late 1970s and early 80s. But theatres rarely stage the first tetralogy. Dench! Gambon! Him out of Downton Abbey! Benedict Cumberbatch as history’s most swoonsome Richard III! But does anyone actually know the Henry VI plays? Most of us are on nodding terms with Falstaff and Hal, and even David Cameron is able to spout the French-bashing bits from Henry V.
N ews that the BBC has followed 2012’s The Hollow Crown by commissioning a second series, based on the Henry VI plays and to be screened as part of the current Shakespeare season, has sent Bardolaters into a frenzy.
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