ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the publication history of, and claims to authorship for, three plays about the life and times of Henry VI that were first written and performed in the early 1590s. Versions of all three plays were included in the 1623 First Folio collection of Shakespeare’s plays as, 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI, respectively. Identified as Shakespeare’s alone, like all of the plays in the Folio collection, this simple claim to solo authorship belies a highly complicated textual situation involving, as this chapter investigates, several stages of co-authorship and revision.
