"King Henry VI": Pt. 1 (Arden Shakespeare)

by WilliamShakespeare (Author), A . S . Cairncross (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1992

  $3.27

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $4.54

  A fresh look at a play usually regarded as the first component of a three-part historical epic, this edition argues that Henry VI Part 1 is a 'prequel', a freestanding piece that returns for ironic and dramatic effect to a story already familiar to its audience. The play's ingenious use of stage space is closely analysed, as is its manipulation of a series of setpiece combats to give a coherent syntax of action. Discussion of the dramatic structure created by the opposing figures of Talbot and Jeanne la Pucelle, and exploration of the critical controversies surrounding the figure of Jeanne, lead to a reflection on the nature of the history play as genre in the 1590s.

• New

  Paperback
  1990

  $14.21

  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.