This edition celebrates King Henry VI Part 2 as one of the most exciting and dynamic plays of the English renaissance theatre, with its exploration of power politics and social revolution and its focus on the relationship between divine justice and sin. An extensive discussion of performance history traces the play`s progress on stage from abridgement and adaptation to full historical epic. A survey of criticism discusses the wide range of responses provoked by the play`s handling of its historical theme, and concludes by focusing on the element of burlesque in the attempted social revolution portrayed.


Table of contents
List of illustrations

General editors preface

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION
Performance
- Abridgement and adaptation
- From abridgement to full text
Criticism
- Augustans to German Romantics
- Victorians and Edwardians
- Tillyard and the Tudor myth
- Brockbank and the anti-Tillyardians
- Providence on trial
- Carnivalesque history
- Seneca, rhetoric and poetry
- Feminism
- History, justice and drama
Text
- The upstart Crow
- Date, sequence and authorship
- From revision to report
- Acceptance and reaction

KING HENRY VI, Part 2

Longer Notes

Appendices
1) The First Quarto (1594)
2) Q1 and Q3 variants
3) Recollections in The Contention
4) Doubling chart
5) Sources
6) Genealogical tables

Abbreviations and references
Index