Riggs, David. “The Hero in History: A Reading of Henry VI.” In Shakespeare’s Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition, pp. 93–139. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

  Riggs’s analysis of the three parts of H6 within the context of exemplary history and heroic drama (as defined by Marlowe’s Tamburlaine) leads him to conclude that the trilogy is crucial to Shakespeare’s developing conception of the history play as a dialectic between heroic ideals and ethical and political realities. In his anti-Tillyardian reading, the H6 plays become “an extended meditation on the decline of heroic idealism between the Hundred Years War and the Yorkist accession.” 1 Henry VI (discussed on pp. 100–113) recasts the latter part of that war as “an exercise in ‘parallel lives’ ”—specifically Talbot’s and Joan’s, the latter an “extended parody” of the chivalric ideal epitomized by Talbot. The chief contrast of legitimacy versus bastardy plays out in a rhetorical structure conducive to a comparison of the two characters in ethical terms. Both the elder and younger Talbot construe the doctrine of the family name as a timeless dynastic possession to be transmitted from father to son “so literally that valor becomes . . . a test of legitimacy” (see 4.6.50–51). If one of the privileges accompanying “gentle birth” (in both the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) is the right to bear arms, then “the stain of illegitimacy is presumptive evidence of someone’s unworthiness” to do so. This ethical failing is underscored in Joan, whose “shameful” military tactics reveal “the baseness of her origins” and whose final scene before being led off to execution (5.4) “brings to light the fact that she lacks any family name to augment and transmit,” thus providing an “ironic counterstatement” to the deaths of the chivalric father and son. In the subplot dealing with domestic factions, “the epic warrior gives way to the fashionable courtier” illustrated by Somerset and York, examples of natural nobility “diverted to trivial ends.” “The crowning irony” of 1H6 is that Somerset’s and York’s trivial sense of honor (as evidenced by the hollow ring of their appeals to family heritage) is more disastrous to Talbot and his ideals than all of the base policy devised by the enemy abroad.

  Saccio, Peter. “Henry VI: The Loss of Empire.” Chapter 5 in Shakespeare’s English Kings: History, Chronicle and Drama, pp. 91–113. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 2000.

  The chapter on 1H6 is divided into three parts. The first provides a brief introduction to the trilogy as a whole; the second addresses the end of the Hundred Years War between England and France; and the third discusses Shakespeare’s “radical simplification of the narrative” found in Hall and Holinshed. 1H6, which covers the years 1422–44, deals with the loss of England’s French territory; its chief antagonists are the English hero Lord Talbot and the French heroine Joan la Pucelle. “Instead of merely selecting and shaping [the historical narrative, as he does in R2], Shakespeare chops the whole story into little pieces, eliminates a large number of them, and rebuilds the remainder into a structure bearing very little resemblance to the original historical sequence. . . . [T]he [resulting] dramatic narrative is analytic rather than historical.” The changes made in chronology and episodes, and the unhistorical causal linkage of disparate events, show “how France was lost . . . [through] English internal divisiveness and the extraordinary influence of scheming Frenchwomen.” Examples of Shakespeare’s dramatic license include the following: the telescoping of disasters reported in 1.1; the mingling of events in Act 5 with the capture and execution of Joan (which occurred a decade earlier); an emphasis on Talbot’s heroism at the expense of Salisbury’s and Bedford’s; the decision to make John Talbot younger than he actually was and the only child of his father; the depiction of English civil dissension as the cause of Talbot’s defeat and death; and the turning of Suffolk’s motivation for arranging the betrothal between Henry and Margaret into “a full-blown Shakespearean elaboration of a mere hint in Hall.” Despite the unwieldy material and the “negative or untraceable character” of Henry VI, the plays themselves, though lacking the poetic and psychological complexity of the later histories, are “sinewy and vigorous” and continue to prove compelling when staged.

  Walsh, Brian. “ ‘Unkind division’: The Double Absence of Performing History in 1 Henry VI.” Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004): 119–47.

  Walsh contends that 1H6 deserves attention as “a vehicle for exploring the provocative play of pastness on the late Elizabethan stage.” An early reflection on the history genre, Part 1 characterizes history and performance “as fraught, mutually destabilizing concepts,” similar in their shared “reliance on referring.” The referent in each case is “dubious and unstable,” since neither historiography nor performance can ever objectively render the past “as it really was.” This “joint destabilization” is most apparent in the rhetoric of succession as it engages biological, political, and cultural issues. Throughout 1H6, where the idea of loss is central, we find a breakdown in both lineal succession (as a way of structuring historical narrative) and performance (as a form of presenting the past) that frustrates notions of continuity between the present and the past. The play “proposes that to perform history in the Elizabethan popular theater is not to render the past more accessible but to stage a confrontation with the past’s elusiveness that is both troubling and teeming with possibility.” The essay pays special attention to Talbot, who is “particularly equivocal about issues of presence and public display”; to factionalism, which not only signals and causes England’s ruin but is also “a dramatic method of introducing contested histories”; and to the ending, with its “precarious” victory over the French.

  Shakespeare’s Language

  Abbott, E. A. A Shakespearian Grammar. New York: Haskell House, 1972.

  This compact reference book, first published in 1870, helps with many difficulties in Shakespeare’s language. It systematically accounts for a host of differences between Shakespeare’s usage and sentence structure and our own.

  Blake, Norman. Shakespeare’s Language: An Introduction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.

  This general introduction to Elizabethan English discusses various aspects of the language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, offering possible meanings for hundreds of ambiguous constructions.

  Dobson, E. J. English Pronunciation, 1500–1700. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.

  This long and technical work includes chapters on spelling (and its reformation), phonetics, stressed vowels, and consonants in early modern English.

  Hope, Jonathan. Shakespeare’s Grammar. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2003.

  Commissioned as a replacement for Abbott’s Shakespearian Grammar, Hope’s book is organized in terms of the two basic parts of speech, the noun and the verb. After extensive analysis of the noun phrase and the verb phrase come briefer discussions of subjects and agents, objects, complements, and adverbials.

  Houston, John. Shakespearean Sentences: A Study in Style and Syntax. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

  Houston studies Shakespeare’s stylistic choices, considering matters such as sentence length and the relative positions of subject, verb, and direct object. Examining plays throughout the canon in a roughly chronological, developmental order, he analyzes how sentence structure is used in setting tone, in characterization, and for other dramatic purposes.

  Onions, C. T. A Shakespeare Glossary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

  This revised edition updates Onions’s standard, selective glossary of words and phrases in Shakespeare’s plays that are now obsolete, archaic, or obscure.

  Robinson, Randal. Unlocking Shakespeare’s Language: Help for the Teacher and Student. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English and the ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills, 1989.

  Specifically designed for the high-school and undergraduate college teacher and student, Robinson’s book addresses the problems that most often hinder present-day readers of Shakespeare. Through work with his own students, Robinson found that many readers today are particularly puzzled by such stylistic characteristics as subject-verb inversion, interrupted structures, and compression. He shows how our own colloquial language contains comparable structures, and thus helps students recognize such structures when they find them in Shakespeare’s plays. This book supplies worksheets—with examples from major plays—to illuminate and remedy such problems as unusual sequences of words and the separation of related parts of sentences.

  Williams, Gordon. A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. 3 vols. London: Athlone Press, 1994.

  Williams provides a comprehensive list of words to which Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and later Stuart writers gave sexual meanings. He supports his identification of these meanings by extensive quotations.

  Shakespeare’s Life

  Baldwin, T. W. William Shakspere’s Petty School. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1943.

  Baldwin here investigates the theory and practice of the petty school, the first level of education in Elizabethan England. He focuses on that educational system primarily as it is reflected in Shakespeare’s art.

  Baldwin, T. W. William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke. 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944.

  Baldwin attacks the view that Shakespeare was an uneducated genius—a view that had been dominant among Shakespeareans since the eighteenth century. Instead, Baldwin shows, the educational system of Shakespeare’s time would have given the playwright a strong background in the classics, and there is much in the plays that shows how Shakespeare benefited from such an education.

  Beier, A. L., and Roger Finlay, eds. London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis. New York: Longman, 1986.

  Focusing on the economic and social history of early modern London, these collected essays probe aspects of metropolitan life, including “Population and Disease,” “Commerce and Manufacture,” and “Society and Change.”

  Chambers, E. K. William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930.

  Analyzing in great detail the scant historical data, Chambers’s complex, scholarly study considers the nature of the texts in which Shakespeare’s work is preserved.

  Cressy, David. Education in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Edward Arnold, 1975.

  This volume collects sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and early eighteenth-century documents detailing aspects of formal education in England, such as the curriculum, the control and organization of education, and the education of women.

  Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010.

  This biography, first published in 2001 under the title Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life, sets out to look into the documents from Shakespeare’s personal life—especially legal and financial records—and it finds there a man very different from the one portrayed in more traditional biographies. He is “ungentle” in being born to a lower social class and in being a bit ruthless and more than a bit stingy. As the author notes, “three topics were formerly taboo both in polite society and in Shakespearean biography: social class, sex and money. I have been indelicate enough to give a good deal of attention to all three.” She examines “Shakespeare’s uphill struggle to achieve, or purchase, ‘gentle’ status.” She finds that “Shakespeare was strongly interested in intense relationships with well-born young men.” And she shows that he was “reluctant to divert much, if any, of his considerable wealth towards charitable, neighbourly, or altruistic ends.” She insists that his plays and poems are “great, and enduring,” and that it is in them “that the best of him is to be found.”

  Dutton, Richard. William Shakespeare: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

  Not a biography in the traditional sense, Dutton’s very readable work nevertheless “follows the contours of Shakespeare’s life” as it examines Shakespeare’s career as playwright and poet, with consideration of his patrons, theatrical associations, and audience.

  Honan, Park. Shakespeare: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

  Honan’s accessible biography focuses on the various contexts of Shakespeare’s life—physical, social, political, and cultural—to place the dramatist within a lucidly described world. The biography includes detailed examinations of, for example, Stratford schooling, theatrical politics of 1590s London, and the careers of Shakespeare’s associates. The author draws on a wealth of established knowledge and on interesting new research into local records and documents; he also engages in speculation about, for example, the possibilities that Shakespeare was a tutor in a Catholic household in the north of England in the 1580s and that he acted particular roles in his own plays, areas that reflect new, but unproven and debatable, data—though Honan is usually careful to note where a particular narrative “has not been capable of proof or disproof.”

  Potter, Lois. The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

  This critical biography of Shakespeare takes the playwright from cradle to grave, paying primary attention to his literary and theatrical milieu. The chapters “follow a chronological sequence,” each focusing on a handful of years in the playwright’s life. In the chapters that cover his playwriting years (5–17), each chapter focuses on events in Stratford-upon-Avon and in London (especially in the commercial theaters) while giving equal space to discussions of the plays and/or poems Shakespeare wrote during those years. Filled with information from Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical worlds, the biography also shares frequent insights into how modern productions of a given play can shed light on the play, especially in scenes that Shakespeare’s text presents ambiguously.

  Schoenbaum, S. William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

  Schoenbaum’s evidence-based biography of Shakespeare is a compact version of his magisterial folio-size Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Schoenbaum structures his readable “compact” narrative around the documents that still exist which chronicle Shakespeare’s familial, theatrical, legal, and financial existence. These documents, along with those discovered since the 1970s, form the basis of almost all Shakespeare biographies written since Schoenbaum’s books appeared.

  Shakespeare’s Theater

  Bentley, G. E. The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

  Bentley readably sets forth a wealth of evidence about performance in Shakespeare’s time, with special attention to the relations between player and company, and the business of casting, managing, and touring.

  Berry, Herbert. Shakespeare’s Playhouses. New York: AMS Press, 1987.

  Berry’s six essays collected here discuss (with illustrations) varying aspects of the four playhouses in which Shakespeare had a financial stake: the Theatre in Shoreditch, the Blackfriars, and the first and second Globe.

  Berry, Herbert, William Ingram, and Glynne Wickham, eds. English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

  Wickham presents the government documents designed to control professional players, their plays, and playing places. Ingram handles the professional actors, giving as representative a life of the actor Augustine Phillips, and discussing, among other topics, patrons, acting companies, costumes, props, playbooks, provincial playing, and child actors. Berry treats the twenty-three different London playhouses from 1560 to 1660 for which there are records, including four inns.

  Cook, Ann Jennalie. The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

  Cook’s work argues, on the basis of sociological, economic, and documentary evidence, that Shakespeare’s audience—and the audience for English Renaissance drama generally—consisted mainly of the “privileged.”

  Dutton, Richard, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

  Dutton divides his study of the theatrical industry of Shakespeare’s time into the following sections: “Theatre Companies,” “London Playhouses,” “Other Playing Spaces,” “Social Practices,” and “Evidence of Theatrical Practices.” Each of these sections is further subdivided, with subdivisions assigned to individual experts. W. R. Streitberger treats the “Adult Playing Companies to 1583”; Sally-Beth MacLean those from 1583 to 1593; Roslyn L. Knutson, 1593–1603; Tom Rutter, 1603–1613; James J. Marino, 1613–1625; and Martin Butler, the “Adult and Boy Playing Companies 1625–1642.” Michael Shapiro is responsible for the “Early (Pre-1590) Boy Companies and Their Acting Venues,” while Mary Bly writes of “The Boy Companies 1599–1613.” David Kathman handles “Inn-Yard Playhouses”; Gabriel Egan, “The Theatre in Shoreditch 1576–1599”; Andrew Gurr, “Why the Globe Is Famous”; Ralph Alan Cohen, “The Most Convenient Place: The Second Blackfriars Theater and Its Appeal”; Mark Bayer, “The Red Bull Playhouse”; and Frances Teague, “The Phoenix and the Cockpit-in-Court Playhouses.” Turning to “Other Playing Spaces,” Suzanne Westfall describes how “ ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’: Household Entertainments”; Alan H. Nelson, “The Universities and the Inns of Court”; Peter Greenfield, “Touring”; John H. Astington, “Court Theatre”; and Anne Lancashire, “London Street Theater.” For “Social Practices,” Alan Somerset writes of “Not Just Sir Oliver Owlet: From Patrons to ‘Patronage’ of Early Modern Theatre,” Dutton himself of “The Court, the Master of the Revels, and the Players,” S. P. Cerasano of “Theater Entrepreneurs and Theatrical Economics,” Ian W. Archer of “The City of London and the Theatre,” David Kathman of “Players, Livery Companies, and Apprentices,” Kathleen E. McLuskie of “Materiality and the Market: The Lady Elizabeth’s Men and the Challenge of Theatre History,” Heather Hirschfield of “ ‘For the author’s credit’: Issues of Authorship in English Renaissance Drama,” and Natasha Korda of “Women in the Theater.” On “Theatrical Practices,” Jacalyn Royce discusses “Early Modern Naturalistic Acting: The Role of the Globe in the Development of Personation”; Tiffany Stern, “Actors’ Parts”; Alan Dessen, “Stage Directions and the Theater Historian”; R. B. Graves, “Lighting”; Lucy Munro, “Music and Sound”; Dutton himself, “Properties”; Thomas Postlewait, “Eyewitnesses to History: Visual Evidence for Theater in Early Modern England”; and Eva Griffith, “Christopher Beeston: His Property and Properties.”