Battles swing back and forth, oaths are made to be broken, and fathers and sons kill each other in a battlefield tableau that is the trilogy’s moral nadir. Margaret becomes one of Shakespeare’s fiercest figures, and a hunchbacked young Duke of Gloucester begins speaking directly to us in soliloquies of thrilling, cheerful malice.
Read it as the bridge it is: the play’s final scenes hand the story, and the stage, to the man who will call himself Richard III.
Henry VI, Part 3 on screen
1The Hollow Crown: Henry VI, Part 2 (2016)
TV film · dir. Dominic Cooke
Adapts Part 3 of the trilogy
Reading Henry VI, Part 3 this year?
Mark it in your record when you finish — one seat, kept for decades.