ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s plays have not only confused our understanding of the fifteenth century by canonizing the interpretations current in the Tudor period; they have also misled us seriously over what actually happened. A play compresses into a few hours events that occurred over many years, and a playwright inevitably foreshortens and simplifies, in order to fit his dramatic purposes. Events in real life do not happen as they do on a stage. The fifteenth century was a very complex period, and the crises were at times bewildering in the speed and extent of the reversals of fortune. It is easy to despair of ever making sense of what was going on. We shall begin with the background to the outbreak of open war in 1455.
