Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Waldo F. McNeir

Critical Essay by Waldo F. McNeir

SOURCE: “Comedy in Shakespeare's Yorkist Tetralogy,” in Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 9, April, 1974, pp. 48-55.

In the essay below, McNeir recounts numerous elements of comedy in Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III.

The pattern of English history from Richard II to Richard III is comic in the sense that it includes usurpation, troubles, a respite, suffering, expiation, deliverance. Because the form of the cycle is all-inclusive, Shakespeare incorporates the condition of the damned into the comic pattern. This produces a variety of parallels and contrasts: double plots and double-dealing, incongruent elements of the pathetic and the risible, mixed modes of character portrayal and development. Comic elements in the Yorkist tetralogy have received little attention.

Henry VI, Part 1 offers opportunities for comic stage spectacle. It calls for almost as much acrobatic leaping about on the walls of Orleans and Rouen, climbing up and jumping down,...
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