The Henry VI plays were a major determiner regarding the direction of the rest of Shakespeare's career. It seems that scholars are not uniformly in agreement over these being the earliest of the plays, but they were, at the very least, among the first five. They were almost certainly written before Marlowe's English history play, Edward II (completed in 1594) and a big influence on its writing, the opposite from what popular opinion and culture (Shakespeare in Love, for example) tell us about which writer was learning and which was leading the way. And many scholars are now giving their support to what is known as the "early start" theory, according to which Shakespeare began his writing career in 1586, the same year as Marlowe's.

The writing of three Henry VI plays, it seems obvious, also taught Shakespeare a lot, because from the experience he found a way of working that would allow his greatest and most unique strengths to be incorporated into the process, i.e. his ability to find psychological realism in virtually any character in any situation. And from them, a character emerged who was to be the first of his many larger-than-life protagonists. I'll be writing about him tomorrow.

The three parts of Henry VI are dazzling plays by any standards other than Shakespeare's. Compared to his best work, there's no question that they come up short, but then that's not really a fair comparison, because the fact is that the writing of these early plays was what allowed him to learn his poetic and dramatic crafts so thoroughly. There's no way that the rest of Shakespeare's work would have been written without the earliest plays: Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, and particularly these three, because I think they were the most responsible for what followed, in terms of both technique and content. Over the next couple of posts, I'll try to convince you as to why, but for today let's simply consider what an ambitious undertaking it was for a young writer to adapt the Wars of the Roses for the stage. Michael Taylor puts it best in one of the notes to his excellent introduction to his 2003 edition of the Oxford Henry VI, Part One: "Many commentators have pointed out the sheer unlikelihood of conceiving a play in three parts at this time. A two-part play such as Marlowe's Tamburlaine was itself a daring venture; a three-part play, so the argument runs, would have been inconceivable. (Although it is always dangerous to talk about the inconceivable when we are dealing with Shakespeare.)"