Dominique Goy-Blanquet: Shakespeare’s Early History Plays. From Chronicle to Stage.

• Wolfgang Riehle

In his new book Dominique Goy-Blanquet is mainly concerned with the sources of Shakespeare’s early history plays, thereby courageously contradicting current critical preferences. He also rejects the modern “disintegrators’” approach to the Henry VI plays and the claim that these consist of “things of shreds and patches put together by several hands” (p. 1). These objections would seem sound and sensible at a time when the theory of the “death of the author” is beginning to become outdated. Further Goy-Blanquet argues convincingly that there is no valid reason whatsoever for the assumption that the first part of Henry VI should have been written as the trilogy’s last play, and that it makes best sense to assume that the three plays were written as a kind of “continuous work in progress” by a “creative mastermind” (ibid.) and a “conscious artist”, in fact by “the same who wrote Richard III, Macbeth, and Hamlet” (ibid.), and also that “[e]ach play is dramatically valid, but significantly impoverished when isolated from its context”. (p. 193)

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