Henry VI Part 1 Study Guide

William Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, a town in central England, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. In his early 20s, Shakespeare began working as a writer and actor in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, an all-male theater troupe; after King James I rose to power and began patronizing Shakespeare’s work, the group was renamed the King’s Men. Shakespeare authored 154 sonnets and 39 plays in his lifetime, beginning with Henry VI Part 1. The first 10 years of Shakespeare’s career saw the playwright (now sometimes known as “the Bard”) focus mostly on comedies and history plays, before pivoting to the tragedies—including Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear—that are generally considered his masterpieces. Shakespeare is the most produced playwright of all time, and his plays have been translated into many, many languages. Though little is known about the details of Shakespeare’s personal life, he was married to Anne Hathaway and shared three children with her: Susanna, Judith, and Hamnet, a young boy who died when he was only 11 years old. 

Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 1 dramatizes a number of real events including: the succession of Henry VI to the throne after his father Henry V died; the lead-up to the Wars of the Roses, in which Richard Plantagenet (later Duke of York) would try to wrest control of England from Henry VI and the Lancaster family; and, most notably, the end of the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453), in which English forces fought—ultimately unsuccessfully—for control over France. Crucially, however, the play often breaks with history in small ways (like changing characters’ names and titles) and in big ways (rearranging timelines and condensing events). It is also vital to observe how Shakespeare’s depiction of the French forces reflects his own English nationalism and prejudices, as can be especially seen in the way Henry VI Part 1 treats Joan la Pucelle—better to known to contemporary audiences as Joan of Arc. Though Joan of Arc is generally recognized as a heroic warrior and important proto-feminist (in addition to being formally sainted by the Catholic church), Shakespeare renders her as satanic and dishonest, part of the play’s larger effort to discredit the French forces and thus valorize the English.

Though there had been other history plays by English writers—perhaps most famously Christopher Marlowe’s two-part play Tamburlaine—Henry VI Part 1 is widely considered to be one of the first plays to wrestle with history in all its complexity and contradiction. As such, the most important related literary works for Henry VI, Part I are the Shakespeare plays that followed it: Henry VI Part 2 (about the escalation to the Wars of the Roses); Henry VI Part 3 (which follows the actual battles that defined the bloody civil war); and Richard III (which depicts Richard, Duke of Gloucester in his attempt to usurp the throne from his brother King Edward IV). Though not written strictly in chronological order, these four plays form an informal quartet about English history, often referred to by scholars as “The Wars of the Roses” tetralogy.