The politics of the text : "Henry VI" by William Shakespeare

The paper explores various aspects of Shakespeare's trilogy in pursuit of the complicated web of meanings of the term "politics" in the space between fiction (drama, theatre) and history (narratives that pretend to offer facts and their interpretation). The trilogy is presented as a set of dramatic texts which together form a continuum, yet each play has a separate, well defined profile; the texts are seen as oscillating between the genres of tragedy and history, and the implications of such "politics of the text" are discussed. A detailed analysis of the three parts of Henry VI discovers specific ambiguities of the dramatic narratives which allows for the varied, if not suspect, politics of their theatrical interpretations. In the last resort the politics of the text discovers the politics of reception; Shakespeare's manipulation of history turned fiction turned a lesson-in-history discovers the field of possible manipulations of critical and theatrical reception