"King Henry VI": Pt. 2 (Arden Shakespeare: Third)

by WilliamShakespeare (Author), RonaldKnowles (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $6.23

  This edition celebrates King Henry VI Part 2 as one of the most exciting and dynamic plays of the English renaissance theatre, with its exploration of power politics and social revolution and its focus on the relationship between divine justice and sin. An extensive discussion of performance history traces the play's progress on stage from abridgement and adaptation to full historical epic. A survey of criticism discusses the wide range of responses provoked by the play's handling of its historical theme, and concludes by focusing on the element of burlesque in the attempted social revolution portrayed.

• Used

  Paperback
  1969

  $9.20

  The Arden Shakespeare is the definitive edition of Shakespeare's work. Justly celebrated for its authoritative scholarship and invaluable commentary, Arden guides you to a richer understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare's plays.

• New

  Paperback
  1990

  $14.08

  Shakespeare's plays about the reign of Henry VI, written at the beginning of his career, were for a long time undervalued. This was because of doubts about their authorship and because of the difficulties involved in determining their theatrical provenance. Recently, however, a series of outstanding productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company and others has demonstrated their theatrical vitality, their conventions have been better understood in the light of new critical methods, and their innovative and sceptical questioning of Elizabethan orthodoxies has been understood in the light of revisionist readings of the history of Shakespeare's own times. This, the first major edition for over twenty-five years, takes account of recent discoveries concerning Shakespeare's early career. The First Part of King Henry VI, which gives us Shakespeare's portrait of Joan of Arc, stands revealed both as a successful venture in its own exploratory style, and as a necessary account of key events in the Hundred Years War without which the Wars of the Roses, anatomised in the following two plays, cannot be understood.