The First Folio and the Invention of Serial Shakespeare – Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3

One of the most remarkable innovations of the Folio “editors” concerns the organization into three genres, “Comedies”, “Histories”, and “Tragedies”, creating a symmetry between three roughly equivalent sets of plays. The neat division in genres has durably affected our reception of Shakespeare’s plays, but it is perhaps the critical fortune of the “histories” that has been most dramatically impacted by the Folio’s editorial choices. Focusing on late medieval English history (to the exclusion of Ancient Rome, Britain, and Scotland), the “editors” ignored the order of composition and publication, and published the plays as a sequence, beginning with King John and ending with Henry VIII, thus following the chronology of events. The effect was to construct Shakespeare as a historian of the English nation, and to reveal an eight-play series covering a continuous historical sequence of one century, from Richard II’s last years to the fall of Richard III, an ensemble which could conveniently be broken up into two symmetrical segments. This editorial strategy has encouraged readers to see these plays as multiple parts of a whole, and created the illusion of a grand narrative. It has literally invented a serial Shakespeare. The question of authorial intentionality must once more be raised, however, given that the plays were not performed consecutively, and not written in the Folio’s order. Shakespeare only wrote two two-part plays: The History of Henrie the Fourth (1598) and its sequel, The Second part of Henrie the fourth (1600), and The First Part of the Contention (1594), followed by The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the whole contention betweene the two Houses Lancaster and Yorke (1595). These latter plays, later gathered by Thomas Pavier as The Whole Contention between the two Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke (1619), were eventually published as 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI in the Folio. This article focuses on the three parts of Henry VI. By looking at their performance and textual histories, it reexamines the question of the delayed publication of Henry VI, Part 1. By setting the notion of seriality in perspective, the aim is to try and better understand the agency of the compiler(s)-cum-editor(s), and perhaps the intervention of a reviser, who could, or could not be the author.