Chapter 2 - ‘Undoing all, as all had never been’:

Summary

This chapter offers close readings of the Henry VI plays by Shakespeare (and his collaborators) in its exploration of a dramatic world convulsed by ‘incessant wars’. Late Elizabethan England remained thoroughly acquainted with the demands and traumas of resourcing multiple fields of conflict. Responding to the consuming debate surrounding militarism supported in late sixteenth-century publications and debate, these plays, written in the years directly following the defeat of the Armada, conjure up a tumultuous political landscape all too familiar to those attending the playhouse in the final decade of Elizabeth’s reign: the landscape of a nation beset by anxieties of suppressed religious and political identities as a consequence of unceasing military campaigns abroad, conspiracies at home, shifting allegiances of court factions and abiding questions surrounding the royal succession. Such texts spoke unflinchingly to the audience of what its world had been and what it might become again.