Even though the three Henry VI plays are some of the least performed and appreciated in the canon, their writing was an incredibly ambitious undertaking that had large-scale influence on the rest of Shakespeare's career. Today, I'd like to focus on the thematic content of the plays which treat English wars both foreign (the Hundred Years War) and civil (the Wars of the Roses) as well as the machinations and treacheries that led to them. In fact, one reason that the plays were not performed for most of the last 400 years (they've been seen somewhat more frequently since the 1960s), is their almost unrelenting darkness and brutality. And I'm not sure that this can be attributed to Shakespeare: aside from the telescoping and conflation necessary for dramatic purposes, the events are portrayed with great accuracy. The plays show things as they really were. Their creation must have been quite an affecting experience for a young writer on a psychological level, to say the least. My belief is that Shakespeare's submersion in the violence and chaos these plays contain led to the central mission of his career: the exploration for the causes of war and injustice and the examination of what it means to be human.