SOURCE: "Henry VI" in Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays, Routledge, 1988, pp. 1-31.

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.

The first scene of the Henry VI trilogy is a formal ceremony, the funeral of Henry V. Bedford's opening speech dignifies the occasion with a note of cosmic tragedy—'Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!' (I.i.1)—and goes on to rebuke 'the bad revolting stars, / That have consented unto Henry's death' (I.i.4-5). He later imagines Henry, now a star himself, combating 'with adverse planets in the heavens' (I.i.54) to preserve...