But, even in these early plays, Shakespeare offsets baronial battles with vivid glimpses of common life. Power (the concept, not the script editor) becomes the dominant theme as the rival parties of York and Lancaster go to it. I would guess that the first two-hour segment of the BBC version, broadcast on Saturday night, will have also kept viewers riveted to their screens, astonished that Shakespeare could outdo Game of Thrones.Ĭondensing the trilogy into two sections, as Ben Power and Dominic Cooke have done here – and as Peter Hall and John Barton did in their 1963 Stratford production of The Wars of the Roses – inevitably means some loss. But, as RSC revivals of the complete trilogy by Michael Boyd and Terry Hands have proved, they make terrific theatre.
Harold Bloom, in his massive book on Shakespeare, devotes a derisory seven pages to the three Henry VI plays and tells us “they do not live now”. Shakespeare’s early histories used to be written off.
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