The quarto edition of this play was printed in 1595 as The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the Whole Contention betweene the two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke, but appears in the highly revised version of the First Folio as The Third Part of Henry the Sixt, with the death of the Duke of YORKE. Its popularity is indicated by its reprinting in quarto (1600) and folio format (1619). Following the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, it is principally concerned with the vicissitudes of the Wars of the Roses, with the alternating defeats and triumphs of Yorkists and Lancastrians. In the course of these struggles both titular heads, the Duke of York and Henry VI, are murdered, together with many of their supporters, leaving Edward IV as king. The widowed Queen Margaret ends exiled and childless, despite her remarkable tenacity for her son’s interests in the face of her husband’s weakness. Many of the scenes are gruesome in the extreme, such as the torture of the captive Duke of York by Margaret after the killing of his son. This scene is followed later by the murder of her own son by the three Yorkist brothers in her presence, after her military defeat. While captive in the Tower of London, King Henry VI is crudely assassinated by Richard of Gloucester.

Unfortunately for the finally triumphant Yorkists, Richard Duke of Gloucester has already become alienated from their cause by the disloyalty of his brother George Duke of Clarence, and by the sexual vagaries of his other brother, King Edward IV. The king’s foolish marriage to a commoner wrecks plans for a more diplomatic alliance with the Duke of Burgundy. Richard’s enormous soliloquy (III.ii. 124-94) about his alienation and ambition to rule is a tour de force evoking a whole new Machiavellian personality which is to dominate the next play in the tetralogy, Richard III. The role will be considered among Shakespeare’s most memorable characters. Indeed, such virtuoso parts of Richard’s role in Part 3 are often transposed to the start of Richard III to reinforce that play’s fascination.

Editors continue to debate the exact relationship of the quarto and folio texts, and the sequence of composition of the three parts now entitled ‘Henry VI’. Critical debates about Part 3‘s sustained brutality often suggest that it exploits popular bad taste, but it has been increasingly revived since Peter Hall’s and John Barton’s production of it as part of their sequence of seven history plays (1963 and 1964): by Terry Hands (1977), Michael Bogdanov (1986), Adrian Noble (1988), Katie Mitchell (1994), Edward Hall (2000) and Michael Boyd (2000, 2006).

Contributed by Hugh Macrae Richmond

On March 12, 1594, a quarto play was entered in the Stationers’ Register by bookseller Thomas Millington, and printed by Thomas Creede later that year, under the title The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinal of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Jack Cade: and the Duke of Yorke’s first claim unto the Crowne. A revised version of this play appears in the First Folio in 1623 under the different title of The second part of Henry VI. The Quarto version may be either an early draft of the Folio script or a reported text provided by actors (or both) – either form explains improvements in the Folio and its correction of Quarto errors.

The full Quarto title covers major elements of the plot but does not identify the central relationship between the weak, if well-meaning King Henry VI and his extraordinarily dynamic French Queen Margaret of Anjou, whose concerns govern much of the action: particularly her competition for court influence with Duke Humphrey and his wife Eleanor, both of whom she destroys with the aid of her lover the Earl of Suffolk, only to lose him by murder on his way to exile. Following the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, the play’s ultimate political concern is the king’s failure to control the rise of Richard, Duke of York, whose family’s claims to the throne, usurped by the Lancastrians, are justified by primogeniture and the incompetent king’s loss of France. The play ends with the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses at the Battle of St. Albans, won by followers of the White Rose of York.

The play was clearly designed as the first of a two-play sequence but there are many striking episodes in the progression of Queen Margaret’s tense conspiracy with the Earl of Suffolk, which involves the witchcraft conjuration that destroys Duchess Eleanor as prelude to the discrediting and murder of her husband, Duke Humphrey. Involvement in this plot evokes the hysterical death scene of the Machiavellian Cardinal of Winchester. The sardonic anti-establishment activities of the rebel Cade are disruptions sponsored by the Yorkists. All are phases in a conflicted society’s progress towards self-destruction. However, for centuries the play survived in fragments and adaptations, emerging separately only in the mid-nineteenth century, but still reinforced later as a part of combined performances with Parts 1 and 3 in the twentieth century. Its full recognition was greatly aided by its inclusion in The Wars of the Roses staged by Hall and Barton to celebrate the fourth centennial of Shakespeare’s birth, with Peggy Ashcroft brilliantly exploiting the mercurial role of Queen Margaret as its supreme creation.

Contributed by Hugh Macrae Richmond

Henry VI, Part 1 invites controversy. The First Folio prints it chronologically among Shakespeare’s histories, first of three Henry VI plays, diverging from order of composition. Thereby Heminge and Condell imply an intended sequence, but Henry VI, Part 1 may be a ‘prequel’ after The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster (2 Henry VI) printed in 1594 and The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke of 1595 (3 Henry VI). In A Groatsworth of Wit (1592) Robert Greene attacks Shakespeare as “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde” who “is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” Greene parodies an already well-known line from Tragedie of Richard, so when Henslowe’s Diary lists a new titled play performed at this time called, “harey the vj”, it appears to be Part 1. Confirming Henslowe, in Piers Pennyless (1592 ) Thomas Nashe celebrated the current impact of this Henry VI, saying that its hero, Talbot, would be “joyed” that “hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators, at least (at severall times) who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.”

Perhaps Shakespeare, only partly involved in the composition of these plays, claimed a greater role than other contributors – possibly Greene and Nashe. Composite authorship invites critical uneasiness about the scripts, reinforced by Part 1‘s harshness to Joan of Arc. While based on chronicles of Henry VI’s reign by Hall and Holinshed, the plays are not unified by this ineffective king, who succeeded his father as an infant, though his incompetence leads to the loss of England’s French possessions and the Wars of the Roses. After the funeral of Henry V the self-destructive English factions in Part 1 put themselves at risk, partly from the energies of three Frenchwomen: the Countess of Auvergne, who is out-witted by Talbot; Jeanne la Pucelle, who defeats and kills him only to be captured and executed herself; and Margaret of Anjou, who introduces a new amatory interest by Act V as the intended spouse of Henry VI. Jeanne d’Arc called herself “la pucelle” (the virgin), which permits puns on this phonetically as “puzel” (whore) as part of hostile presentation. In the script she conjures up devils, and lies freely, as well as exhorting the French powerfully. Yet, feminists to the contrary, hers is the most incisive, complex and paradoxical character in the play, She comes close to being a tragic figure comparable to Lady Macbeth, despite the script’s nationalist overtones.

Though not favored by critics, the play contains iconic scenes, such as the Temple Garden one (II.iv), where factions choose roses providing heraldry for the Wars of the Roses: white for Yorkists, red for Lancastrians. The play revels in action in the French wars: duels showing the actors’ fighting skills. Latterly the play has vindicated its stage-worthiness, often in the three-play series, as with Benson’s Stratford performances of 1906. The script provoked Bernard Shaw’s recension with similar characters in St. Joan (1924). Much modified, Part 1 featured in the notable Barton-Hall series celebrating the fourth centenary of Shakespeare’s birth at Stratford (1964). Its multiple authorship does not preclude stage effectiveness.

Contributed by Hugh Macrae Richmond

Written about 1608, Coriolanus maintains the mature Shakespeare’s shift in historical settings from the Middle Ages to earlier periods. It is one of Shakespeare’s most relentlessly political plays, with a hero’s personality that seems almost as schematic as Timon of Athens’ (also derived from Shakespeare’s favored source in Plutarch’s Lives). This hero of the early Roman republic is an extreme example of those generals, such as Othello and Macbeth, whom Shakespeare shows to mesh awkwardly with civilian society and its values, including their relationships with women. Coriolanus reflects his mother Volumnia’s preoccupation with masculine virtues, despising domestic politics in comparison to battlefield success.

While his aristocratic assertiveness infuriates the Roman Tribunes, representatives of proletarian values, it serves Rome well in his defeat of its Volscian enemies from the rival city of Corioles, a victory that earns Coriolanus his name. However, this success intensifies the Tribunes’ fears: they subvert the election of Coriolanus as Consul, leading to his sentence of exile as an enemy of Rome. When, in revenge, he leads the Coriolans against Rome, he resists the pleas of friends to make peace, but finally negotiates a reconciliation, after his mother’s entreaty, only to be murdered by the resentful Coriolan general, Aufidius, whose leadership he has usurped.

The play fits reasonably well into the formal mould of neoclassical tragedy in topic and values, so it was not ignored in the eighteenth century though heavily adapted, which led to celebrated productions by John Philip Kemble, with his sister Sarah Siddons as Volumnia, beginning in 1789. An alternative, modern approach was developed by psychoanalytic criticism, pursuing an Oedipal fixation on dominant mothers such as Volumnia (perhaps why T. S. Eliot favoured it over Hamlet). Modern political extremism and cynical manipulation have made the play’s focus on exploitive politics more relevant, as with Brecht’s interest in recreating the script. None of these approaches greatly endears the play to current audiences. In Peter Hall’s notable production at Stratford in 1959, Laurence Olivier managed to inject sardonic humor into the contemptuous comments of Coriolanus, but this wry note left his highly emotional treason and final self-sacrifice out of tune for such a skeptical mind.

However, examined objectively, the play shows that Coriolanus usually fails to carry through his obtuse views, submitting (for example) to the rigors of election, only to be falsely accused of treason and exiled. Similarly, at the play’s climax he reluctantly resolves his dilemma of divided loyalties by enforcing compromise on both adversaries, knowing full well that by making peace he may expose himself to fatal hostility from aggressors on either side. To attribute his achievement to mere mother-fixation destroys tragic interest in the play, with its typical Shakespeare hero who intuits a higher moral order too late to save his own life. Modern productions often attempt a more sympathetic approach, for example, by stressing a youthful idealism in the hero, like the deft modernization of him by Toby Stephens as a Bonaparte figure in a revolutionary age, in the brilliantly successful RSC production in 1994, directed by David Thacker. The script’s brutality and absolutism plausibly fitted a Revolutionary Age, gaining modern relevance as well as colorful costumes and sets.

Contributed by Hugh Macrae Richmond

Much Ado About Nothing dates from around 1598, grouped with Shakespeare’s sophisticated middle comedies As You Like It and Twelfth Night, but sharing Merry Wives’ more realistic use of prose. Its traditional plot (resembling the twenty-second of Bandello’s novelle, and the fifth book of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso) presents the disruption of the marriage of Claudio, protégé of the Spanish ruler Don Pedro. Don Pedro’s envious half-brother, the Bastard Don John, fakes promiscuity by the prospective bride, Hero, daughter of the Italian governor of the Sicilian city of Messina. After another false report, of her death from grief, her reputation is saved by the bumbling city watchmen, Elizabethan ‘Keystone Kops’, led by the comically incompetent Dogberry.

This plot line is catalyst for a theme of greater audience interest: the complex evolution of the affair between Benedick (Claudio’s friend) and Beatrice (Hero’s cousin). This pair is at odds after their antecedent relationship was broken off by Benedick’s obtuseness – and Beatrice displays her resentment in a witty war with her ex-lover. Their companions intervene with a plot of staged over-hearings to convince each that the other’s love is merely repressed. These over-hearings govern the play’s punning title, for “nothing” is a homonym of “noting” – and also an Elizabethan term for female genitalia. While others accept Hero’s guilt, Beatrice and Benedick join to defend her. After Claudio’s devotion to her revives, they wryly admit their own recommitment: Benedick’s becoming “engaged” to Beatrice (4.3.331 in Riverside) anticipates our modern premarital contract.

This paradoxical progression of the love/hate relationship of Beatrice and Benedick delights audiences: Leonard Digges versifies for the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems: “let but Beatrice / And Benedick be seen, lo in a trice / The Cockpit, galleries, boxes, all are full.” Later vividly dueling pairs include John Gielgud with Peggy Ashcroft, and Kenneth Branagh with Emma Thompson. Critics often censure what they consider “the main plot” concerning Hero and Claudio for weak characters and melodramatic effects, but the feigned deaths of beloveds recur in Shakespeare, from Juliet to Hermione. Plausibly Hero resists Beatrice’s domination via a plot analogous to that against herself, while Claudio resembles misled lovers Romeo and Bertram.

The exchanges of Beatrice and Benedick match courtly battles of the sexes in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron (Fourth Tale), Castiglione’s Courtier, and those between Shakespeare’s own couples, from Berowne and Rosaline to Antony and Cleopatra. Beatrice seems a proto-feminist in defying the patriarchal Spanish rulers of Sicily, who victimize dutiful women like Hero. Macabre Don John resembles the historical Bastard Don John of Austria (half-brother of King Philip II) who also resided in Messina, after defeating the Turkish fleet at Lepanto (1571). He notoriously planned to offset his bastardy by raising an Armada to conquer and rule Britain, and then marry Mary, Queen of Scots. Later love/hate pairings akin to Beatrice and Benedick include Mirabell and Millamant in Congreve’s The Way of the World, Elizabeth and Darcy in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Martha and George in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Contributed by Hugh Macrae Richmond

In Venus and Adonis (1593), Shakespeare is at his most verbally dexterous, revelling in word play and elaborate linguistic devices. The poem is dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, and takes its story from Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1567). Venus, the goddess of love, attempts to seduce Adonis, a young hunter: “Backward she pushed him, as she would be thrust” (41). In Venus and Adonis Shakespeare inaugurates the tradition of erotic narrative poetry by luxuriating, almost voyeuristically, in the poetry and comedy of seduction. The depiction of sexuality here is in marked contrast with the violent language of rape in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Rape of Lucrece (See for example TGOV, V.iv.59 and ROL, 723).

Like the sonnets, which were begun at around the same time, Venus and Adonis charts the powerful effects of passion. Venus is “Mad in pursuit, and in possession so” (Sonnet 129) – she nimbly darts, smothers, murders, sweats and plucks, “devouring in all haste” (l. 57). When the narrator comments early in the poem, “O how quick is love” (l. 38), he refers both to love in the abstract, and to the goddess herself. Adonis, however, is more reluctant, and is given less description, rendering him passive; he appears lifeless (l. 211) and “like a lazy sprite” (l. 181).

Words here are powerful. They persuade and deny — so much so that Venus is keen to silence Adonis altogether:

Now doth she stroke his cheek, now doth he frown,
And ‘gins to chide, but soon she stops his lips;
And kissing speaks, with lustful language broken,
‘If thou wilt chide, thy lips shall never open (l. 45 – 8).

When he does speak, it is mainly in aphorism, as in lines 419 – 420: “The colt that’s back’d and burden’d being young, / Loseth his pride and never waxeth strong” (l. 419 – 20). Although his words are fewer than Venus’, they are carefully constructed and memorable, incorporating interesting comparisons and reinforcing the poem’s themes of hunting and nature.

The dense rhetorical effect of the poem’s pithy statements is heightened by many puns, such as the description of how Venus “hearkens [...] for his horn” (l. 868). Such verbal wit makes the poem comic at times, although its conclusion takes a tragic turn – Adonis is killed in a hunting accident, and an unsatisfied Venus is left mourning. Some critics claim that the ending demands unqualified pathos (John Roe, 2006), while others have been less sympathetic (Lewis, 1954). However, there has been an effort to avoid moralising or determining a single conclusion for the text and instead “demonstrat[ing] that the poem embodies a multivalency of meanings leading nowhere beyond itself” (Klause, 1988).

The poem has an important place in the canon of English literature – it is often compared to Marlowe’s unfinished Hero and Leander (1958), cited as an example of Sidney’s poetic ideals, and looked to as an inspiration for the vigour and imagination found in Coleridge’s writing. Elsewhere, the famous description of the snail “whose tender horns being hit, / Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain” (l. 1033 – 1034) gave rise to Keats’ memorable comment about a poet at once inspired and defeated by the success of Venus and Adonis: “[Shakespeare] has left nothing to say about nothing or any thing”.

Contributed by Rachel Thorpe

The story of Lucrece, found in both Ovid and Livy, has inspired scores of famous depictions. Britten, Rembrandt, Chaucer, Titian, Gower, Dante, Raphael and Richardson all used the story in their work, but none as famously as Shakespeare in his long narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece (1594).

The poem shares its theme with Venus and Adonis, but is a “graver labour”, lacking comedy and playfulness. Here, “Lust-breathèd Tarquin” succeeds in raping “Lucrece the chaste”, and the language is that of brutal military conquest: “She says her subjects with foul insurrection / Have battered down her consecrated wall”. A sense of conflict is also conveyed by the fact that the poem is structured around a series of stark absolutes – light and dark, male and female, guilt and innocence, purity and lust, “Beauty’s red and Virtue’s white”. Beauty is, in this poem, a dangerous thing, speaking louder than words of reason and restraint: “All orators are dumb when beauty pleadeth”. Vision, however, is privileged, and the poem’s insistence on the language of sight has been linked by Christopher Tilmouth to Renaissance concepts of shame as a sensation that occurs when sins are witnessed. Guilt, shame, sight and voyeurism are all important concerns for the critical conversations that surround the poem.

The first section of the poem gives voice to Tarquin, as he contemplates an act which he knows will ruin him. He claims that no “excuse can my invention make” to justify “so black a deed”, and yet he still chooses to sneak into Lucrece’s chamber. Once the deed is done, the narrative then gives voice instead to the reaction of the innocent victim, as she considers whether she must share the guilt for the deed. After considering at length a painting of the Trojan war, she becomes sure that her only choice is, “To clear this spot by death”. Lucrece’s suicide has baffled such commentators as St Augustine who wish to argue for her innocence, but it is this action that constitutes the concluding tragedy of the poem. Tarquin has marred “the thing that cannot be amended”; Lucrece kills herself and her husband Collantine decrees Tarquin’s “everlasting banishment”. The poem has attracted particular attention from feminist critics such as Jane Newman, who is interested in the simultaneous eloquence and powerlessness of the wronged female.

This poem seems to be closely linked with a number of Shakespeare’s other works. The setting means that it is naturally compared to the other Roman plays, most obviously Titus Andronicus (because of this play’s interest in the powerlessness of words, especially as regards the raped and mutilated Lavinia). The theme of rape also sets it alongside Venus and Adonis and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Tarquin’s fears about the moral implications of his intended action are related to the monologues in Macbeth. The description of the innocent Lucrece as she sleeps is reminiscent of the descriptions of Desdemona in Othello and Imogen in Cymbeline. Shakespeare also mentioned Lucrece in As You Like It and Twelfth Night.

Contributed by Rachel Thorpe

The Two Gentlemen of Verona is often euphemistically referred to as one of Shakespeare’s ‘early plays’. This phrase attempts to account for its relative immaturity; aesthetically and dramaturgically it is considered by many to be inferior to the ‘later plays’. The actual date of writing is not certain, but the first record we have of it is from Mere’s Palladis Tamia, published in 1598. Edward Malone proposed that it is the first work that Shakespeare ever wrote for the stage. Another theory, initially put forward by Clifford Leech, suggests that the play was composed in stages, accounting for some of the textual inconsistencies.

Borrowing from the Portuguese story of Felix and Felismena, the plot focuses on two friends, Valentine and Proteus. Each leaves home and travels from Verona to Milan. Proteus leaves behind his beloved Julia, having exchanged with her rings and promises of “true constancy”. On arriving in Milan, Proteus discovers that Valentine has fallen in love with the Duke’s daughter Silvia and that they have planned to secretly elope together. Unfortunately, Proteus also falls for Silvia, declaring that “the remembrance of my former love / Is by a newer object quite forgotten”. He decides to do whatever it takes to win her for himself. The ensuing drama concerns itself with the limits of male friendship and the foolishness of lovers. The action comes to a climax in one of the most controversial scenes in the canon of Shakespeare’s writing. Many of the most famous performances have gained their notoriety because of the way that they have creatively navigated it, prompting Stanley Well’s comment that the play “has succeeded best when subjected to adaptation”. In the depths of the forest, Proteus threatens to rape Silvia, uttering the infamous line “I’ll force thee yield to my desire”. However, moments later he is reconciled to Valentine, who, despite being fully aware of what his friend has done, seems to offer him Silvia: “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee”. The play closes with Proteus and Julia happily reunited, and a decree that both they and Valentine and Silvia shall be married on the same day, sharing “one feast, one house, one mutual happiness”.

Although the popular opinion is that this is one of Shakespeare’s least accomplished plays, it has enjoyed a rich stage history. Notably, Peter Hall chose it has his first production as artistic director of the RSC in 1960, and John Barton directed another important RSC production in 1981. The play has been set in almost every imaginable era – the medieval, the renaissance, the music-hall 1930s, the rock-and-roll 1950s, the fashion-obsessed 1990s – and is not always confined to Verona and Milan. It attracted further attention after being featured in the Academy Award-winning film Shakespeare in Love (1998), despite never being explicitly named. The play is regularly admired for its spirited comedy. And for the fact that one of the characters is a dog.

Contributed by Rachel Thorpe