Shakespeare News Redux

Folger has announced the recent release of the latest in their series of excellent student editions, Henry VI Part 1:

"Henry VI, Part 1 is an uncompromising celebration of early English nationalism and imperialism. It defines the English against the French, whom it degrades as scheming, effeminate, and willing to consort with the devil. The play idealizes the English king Henry V for his successful conquest of much of France during the Hundred Years War. But Henry V has died just as the play begins, and leadership of the English cause in France has passed to Talbot, an indomitable, fierce, almost perpetually enraged, and therefore altogether masculine warrior hero. Yet Talbot is not as fortunate as Henry V. While all of France, we are told, shakes in terror at the name of Talbot, the French still refuse to yield."

Mean time, A. N. Wilson reviews that self same "bloody river of history on stage," the Henry VI cycle:

"...the RSC production, directed by Michael Boyd, which began two years ago in Stratford. It has been an extremely exciting experience: ingenious, energetic staging, with actors swinging through the air on ropes to besiege Orleans, and the stage opening at intervals to receive the screaming, tortured body of Joan of Arc, or the corpses of various monarchs...The "upstart" 25-year-old Shakespeare (as he was called by jealous Robert Greene) did not write every single word of Part I, but our greatest writer was also a great actor-manager, and it was hard not to feel, after seeing all four plays (with Richard III as a macabre semi-comic afterthought, written for the fans of Richard Burbage, who popularised the role), that they do have a kind of unity."

Big of him to say so.  Says no, Brian Vickers, who has recently claimed the bulk of Henry VI part 1 for Thomas Kyd, with an assist by Nash and a dash by young Shakescene: more computational nonsense.

And speaking of nonsense, "Rylance reveals why he had to quit the Globe over Iraq" trumpets the Independent headline.  Iraq not so much.  Actually, "At the time of his departure from the Globe, many suspected that it may have been Rylance's questioning of Shakespeare's authorship – and his outspokenness on these views – that lost him the support of the theatre's board."  Really, ya think?

And moreso...