SOURCE: Hodgdon, Barbara. “Making it New: Katie Mitchell Refashions Shakespeare-History.” In Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women's Re-Visions in Literature and Performance, edited by Marianne Novy, pp. 13-33. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Hodgdon demonstrates how Katie Mitchell's 1994 production of Henry VI, Part 3 shifted the play's focus from its male to its female characters, thus emphasizing the theme of survival rather than nationalism.

I begin with a familiar text, Thomas Heywood's rave review of “our domesticke hystories”:

What English blood, seeing the person of any bold English man presented and doth not hugge his fame, and hunnye at his valor, pursuing him in his enterprise with his best wishes, and as being wrapt in contemplation, offers to him in his hart all prosperous performance, as if the Personator were the man Personated, so bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action, that it hath power...