SOURCE: "Legitimacy and Sovereign Power: 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI" in The Drama of Power: Studies in Shakespeare 's History Plays, Northwestern University Press, 1973, pp. 101-19.

In this excerpt, Prior discusses the themes of succession, legitimacy and power in the trilogy, focusing on the question of whether Henry VI or York has the stronger claim to England's throne.

The issue of legitimacy and power is at the center of the Henry VI trilogy. It divides loyalties, arouses passions, and becomes a touchstone that exposes character and temperament, and it unfolds in the course of these plays with a complexity that would have delighted Jarndyce and Jarndyce and kept them in fees for years. But in Henry VI its involvements produce a more than Dickensian plot and lead to all the evils that can beset a commonwealth. Each play of the trilogy has its own particular center of conflict, but the...