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.)"

In my lecture yesterday, one of the issues that was raised was that some of the plots are hard to accept easily - how "suspension of disbelief" can be hard to attain, in other words. For example, plots with identical twins and shipwrecks are used in both The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. In taking a close look at Twelfth Night, it occurred to me that the benefit of such a "fantastic" story line is that it allows characters (and the audience) to go to places they wouldn't be able to otherwise. I'll explain, with examples, tomorrow.