So this is the Pitchin Shakespeare series and this week I'm going to talk about the early history play, the second part of Henry the Sixth.

And what I'm going to be asking is how far or in what ways could we see this as an independent play?

Do you remember when Alan Bennett's play The Madness of George III was made into a film?

It had to be retitled The Madness of George III was made into a film. It had to be retitled

The Madness of King George because apparently American producers felt no one would go and see it

if they hadn't seen the Madness of George and the Madness of George too. What I want to try

and think about is that question of seriality in this play, who would go to a play called 2 Henry 6?

And to think about seriality in Shakespeare's history more generally, and then to ask how and in what ways with what methods we might be able to interpret a play whose title tells us right from the start that it is incomplete or

provisional or dependent on other texts.

So the second part, Henry the Sixth, is an early play.

New Oxford Shakespeare that I've been talking about quite a bit this term, which came out in 2016,

and is our latest look at the chronology and the authorship of Shakespeare's plays.

So that edition, the New Oxford Shakespeare, dates the second part of Henry the Sixth, two around 1590, 1590.

So that makes it the first history play Shakespeare wrote.

According to the Oxford, Shakespeare, it's preceded only by two gentlemen of Verona and Titus Andronicus.

I talked a couple of weeks ago about recent arguments about collaboration in all's well that ends well.

And in this play too, we have a recent intervention on collaborative writing.

The suggestion in the new Oxford Shakespeare is that Marlow, Shakespeare and probably another writer and identified, worked together on this play.

I'm not particularly going to engage with the question of joint or collaborative authorship,

except when I talk briefly about conjuring and witchcraft later in the lecture.

But it's a thing worth

thinking about not least because the critical or the interpretive implications of

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