FOREWARD

Summary

I draw to an end of this edition of Henry VI with some relief. It has proved a large and arduous undertaking, larger than I expected when I first set hand to it in May 1948, larger than any three separate Shakespearian plays. For the Three Parts cannot be dismissed one by one, but must be envisaged as a whole, and worked through side by side, so interlocked and vexatiously intricate are their problems. Questions of source have, of course, to be tackled here as elsewhere, though compared to the elaborate dance with three chronicles and sometimes four which Henry VI leads its editor, the pas de deux with North in the Plutarch plays is a simple turn indeed; in which connexion I owe a special debt to my kind helper, Mr C. B. Young, who read all the chronicles with me and did much to guide my steps. Then there are the related questions of date and the company or companies for which the Parts were written; problems difficult enough in any play, but rendered doubly so in the case of Henry VI by the comparative obscurity of the period in the history of the Elizabethan theatre. Last and most contentious of all comes the question of authorship. Many Shakespearian scholars to-day, and among them the most eminent, make no question of this at all.