SOURCE: Carnegy, Patrick. Review of Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3. Spectator 285, no. 8995 (30 December 2000): 32-3.

In the following review, Carnegy praises director Michael Boyd's 2000 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 as a compelling and faithful staging of plays.

These three plays are the least known and indeed often dismissed parts of Shakespeare's series of eight histories running from Richard II through to Richard III. In his magisterial survey, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1999), Harold Bloom offers them no more than seven pages in a book of doorstop proportion. For him all that is memorable is, grudgingly, Joan of Arc in part one, Cade the Kentish hoodlum in part two and in part three Richard Gloucester's apprenticeship in butchery. Bloom saw that all three were ‘vivid comedians’, but as the drift of the plays in which they appear could be described as ‘The Invention of the Inhuman...