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King Henry VI, Part Three was a popular drama when it first appeared. As Norrie Epstein, in the book The Friendly Shakespeare, writes, ''The Henry VI trilogy was a box-office smash that turned an unremarkable actor named William Shakespeare into the most successful playwright of the day.'' Epstein continues that the Elizabethan audiences enjoyed watching dramas that depicted their past. In Shakespeare's time, ''the Wars of the Roses were still vivid in the minds of Shakespeare's audience.'' The stories of the members of the House of Lancaster and the House of York were as familiar to the English audiences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as stories about the Kennedys were to twentieth-century citizens of the United States. Knowing the outcome of all the historic events gave the audiences of Shakespeare's time a ''double perspective,'' which ''allowed them to observe the past while knowing its outcome--both in history and on stage. Thus the characters' words were given an extra level of meaning that is lost to us today.''

Epstein then expounds on the merit of Shakespeare's history plays by stating: ''Shakespeare domesticates history. Kings and queens are mothers and fathers. When not conducting state business, rulers eat, drink, make love, sleep, and gossip.'' In spite of this, Epstein writes, ''Even many Shakespeare enthusiasts don't bother to read Henry VI, and it's rarely performed in its entirety'' (all three parts). Although ''the plot is a sweeping panorama,'' Epstein writes, ''there's no hero, just a succession of characters who temporarily hold center stage and then quickly depart.'' Epstein adds, ''Even Henry seems almost incidental at times.''

Despite the lack of production and the length of this play (when all three parts are considered), Milton Crane, a professor at the George Washington University, who wrote an introduction to the text of Shakespeare's play Henry VI, Part Three, states that in the twentieth century ''more persons have seen the three parts of Henry VI than had ever seen any one of the plays in all the centuries of their existence.'' Crane credits the explosion of interest to the exciting details of the play. ''Though the framework of Henry VI is serious, moral, and didactic--a history, on the one hand, of France's efforts to free herself from English domination and, on the other, of the hideous social and political convulsions that we call the Wars of the Roses--these annals of an age of anarchy are full of thrilling and gruesome details calculated to delight the heart of a groundling.'' Crane then adds that this play, with its bloody feud between the Houses of Lancaster and York, is ''Shakespeare's inspired anticipation of the Western movie.''

Maurice Charney, writing in All of Shakespeare, refers to Henry VI, Part Three as ''undoubtedly Shakespeare's most military play.'' Then Charney adds that from the very first scene in the play, Shakespeare ''sets the tone for this murderous, savage, and chaotic play.'' But for all the blood, there is a scene that Charney focuses on in act two, scene five, the famous Father and Son scene, in which a son realizes that he has killed his father; and a father discovers that he has killed his own son. This scene, Charney writes, ''powerfully enacts a symbolic tableau . . .. This is a choral scene intended to represent what the savagery of the Wars of the Roses is all about.''

In John Julius Norwich's Shakespeare's Kings, the author writes, ''Nowhere is Shakespeare's extraordinary ability to turn a chronicle into a drama more impressively demonstrated than in the third part of King Henry VI.'' It was only in part three of this play, Norwich states, that Shakespeare ''is called upon to encapsulate in little more than two hours what is virtually the entire course of the Wars of the Roses,'' a process that, in reality, took sixteen years. ''Now at last, with all the inevitability of Greek tragedy, the House of Lancaster suffers retribution for the atrocity committed at the end of the previous century: the deposition and murder of Richard II and the usurpation of his crown by Henry IV are finally avenged.'' Norwich then goes on to surmise that in the last scene of the play, Shakespeare makes clear the true purpose of this play, the ''villainy and duplicity'' of Richard, who would go on (in Shakespeare's next play as well as in history) to become Richard III. ''It was this, above all else, that the Elizabethan audiences would carry home with them; it was to emphasize this that Shakespeare had been deliberately building up the character of Richard; and this that he was to make the theme of the last and greatest play of his series [the tetralogy of Henry V, Henry VI, and Richard III ].''

References:

1) Charney, Maurice, All of Shakespeare, Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 132-33.

2) Crane, Milton, ''Introduction,'' in Henry VI, Part One, Henry VI, Part Two, Henry VI, Part Three, Scribner, 1999, pp. xxiii-xxxiv.

3) Epstein, Norrie, The Friendly Shakespeare, Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 161-63, 191.

4) Norwich, John Julius, Shakespeare's Kings, Scribner, 1999, pp. 307, 318.

5) Shakespeare, William, Henry VI, Part One, Henry VI, Part Two, Henry VI, Part Three, Signet, 1989.

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