Opus 2: Henry VI, Part 1

Although there is much that we don’t know about William Shakespeare the man, we can say confidently that he was not an individual who liked to be typecast. Right after completing his Comedy of Errors, a play so thin it threatened to blow away on the merest spring breeze, he embarked upon the theatrical project that stands, in terms of sheer breadth and scope, as the most ambitious of his entire career. Over the course of four plays, each of them more than half again as long as his theatrical debut, he presented a chronicle of English history between the years 1422 and 1485, a turbulent period marked by the extended internal wrangles for the kingdom’s crown known as the Wars of the Roses. The tetralogy, which consists of the three parts of Henry VI followed by Richard III, was audacious in ways that went beyond its daunting length. For Shakespeare used it as his testing ground for a whole new genre of play, one that fit neatly into neither of the traditional categories of comedy and…