SOURCE: “Comedy in Shakespeare's Yorkist Tetralogy,” in Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 9, April, 1974, pp. 48-55.

In the essay below, McNeir recounts numerous elements of comedy in Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III.

The pattern of English history from Richard II to Richard III is comic in the sense that it includes usurpation, troubles, a respite, suffering, expiation, deliverance. Because the form of the cycle is all-inclusive, Shakespeare incorporates the condition of the damned into the comic pattern. This produces a variety of parallels and contrasts: double plots and double-dealing, incongruent elements of the pathetic and the risible, mixed modes of character portrayal and development. Comic elements in the Yorkist tetralogy have received little attention.

Henry VI, Part 1 offers opportunities for comic stage spectacle. It calls for almost as much acrobatic leaping about on the walls of Orleans and Rouen, climbing up and jumping down, demanding as many gymnastic...