From the death of the last great medieval monarch, Henry V, until the ascendancy of Henry Tudor as Henry VII, England underwent a long and bloody transition from feudal kingdom to early modern state. Shakespeares minor tetralogy is the story of this metamorphosis and 1 Henry VI is its beginning chapter. The language and action of 1 Henry VI reflect the legal foundations of feudal England at the point when those underpinnings were beginning to disintegrate. This dissolution is represented through four subplots that emphasize the characters as personae mixtae - private individuals and legal...
From the death of the last great medieval monarch, Henry V, until the ascendancy of Henry Tudor as Henry VII, England underwent a long and bloody tran...
