"He was not of an age, but for all time." So wrote Ben Jonson in his dedicatory verses to the memory of William Shakespeare in 1623, and so we continue to affirm today. No other writer, in English or in any other language, can rival the appeal that Shake...

"He was not of an age, but for all time." So wrote Ben Jonson in his dedicatory verses to the memory of William Shakespeare in 1623, and so we continue to affirm today. No other writer, in English or in any other language, can rival the appeal that Shake...

William Shakespeare's reputation is based primarily on his plays. With the partial exception of the Sonnets (1609), quarried since the early nineteenth century for autobiographical secrets allegedly encoded in them, the nondramatic writings have traditio...

In Act 4 of Shakespeare's The Second Part of King Henry VI, the Duke of Suffolk is captured after a battle at sea. The Captain of the ship plans to execute him. As Suffolk prepares to die, he says to Walter Whitmore, "Pene...

THE ROYAL Shakespeare Company has billed this trilogy The Wars of The Roses or The Plantaganets in past years. This time, they've stuck to what Shakespeare called it, and the only other thing one needs to call it is terrific. In these plays,...

In the following excerpt, Hattaway views Henry VI, Part 2 as a radical political work that features Shakespeare's sweeping reconstruction of English history concentrated on the power of the mighty.

In following essay, Leggatt calls attention to the shifting perspectives the Henry VI plays afford of Richard's progressive development as a mythic figure of unadulterated evil and of Henry as a man who is unqualified to rule yet who espouses the values that everyone else in the trilogy appears to have discarded.

In the excerpt below, Riggs traces Shakespeare's general theme of the deterioration of heroic idealism that took place between the Hundred Years' War and the Yorkist accession in Henry VI.