Shakespeare’s History: Introduction to the Interpretation of ‘The First Part of King Henry the Sixth’ and the English Histories

The First Part of King Henry the Sixth is Shakespeare’s first work for the stage, his first dramatic hit, and, also, his most controversial and suspect history play, a literary genre he perfected. From the vantage of his opening act its close study affords the original introduction to all the histories and the Shakespearean stage as such, as well as to his idea of time and the world generally, that is, to the Shakespearean education. In the course of this initiation there emerges a world, a stage, and, even, a Shakespeare that may increasingly seem more than a little strange to us, whether as seen through the lens of the old bardic conventions or the theories of recent academic revisions, but that are, at the same time, almost certainly more intimately familiar to the original editors of the 1623 folio, and the play itself increasingly revealed as a striking tour de force debut as fresh as the poet everyone is drawn to in the first place.