SOURCE: Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “Swinging It by Golden Twilight.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5101 (5 January 2001): 16.

In the following review of Michael Boyd's 2001 Royal Shakespeare Company staging of Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3, Duncan-Jones admires the overall production, but finds fault with the lagging pace and confusing complications of Part 2.

In a programme note to the RSC's Henry VI trilogy, Lisa Jardine connects the plays with Elizabeth I's “twilight years … the late 1590s”. The evidence is, however, that they belong to the first eighteen months of the 1590s. These were not twilight but golden years, both for Queen Elizabeth and for a high-flying “upstart crow” from the West Midlands. In a blaze of post-Armada triumphalism, the Queen's own players were touring up and down the country with such swashbuckling and xenophobic history plays as The Troublesome Reign of King John and The Famous Victories of Henry V. Meanwhile in London, or rather...