SOURCE: “The First Part of King Henry the Sixth,” in Two Shakespearean Sequences: Henry VI to Richard II and Pericles to Timon of Athens, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977, pp. 15-25.

In the essay below, Brownlow examines 1 Henry VI, considering both its flaws and its theatrical power.

The series of histories comprising the three parts of Henry VI and The Life and Death of Richard III begins with the death of Henry V and deals with the loss of his French conquests and the coming of civil war during his son Henry VI's reign; it ends with Henry Tudor's invasion, his defeat of Richard III, and the inauguration of a new order under the family of Tudor. The plays cover sixty-three complicated years from 1422 to 1485, and the general theory under which the dramatist arranged his materials was familiar because it provided a well-publicised case for the Tudors' legitimacy. Edward...