Authorial Order - But What Author and What Order?

In my initial post I wrote that the purpose of this blog will be to think through Shakespeare's history plays in authorial order.  Thinking through meaning to interrogate the text and then to interrogate my own understanding of the text.  The reason for picking authorial order - the order in which the plays were written is that this should give a better picture of how Shakespeare's thinking about kingship, national leadership and other issues evolved as he wrote the plays.  I then said, however, that I was going to start with Henry VI, Part II which begs the obvious question, why not Part 1?

The answer to this question concerns both the order of the plays and who the actual author was or actual authors were.  Based on my most recent reading there appears to be a consensus among scholars that parts II and III were written first and that Part I is sort of a prequel.  To modern readers this sounds similar to what happened with the Star War movies, indeed the introduction to the Arden edition of Part I makes this very comparison.  Originally Parts II and III had much longer titles giving more details of the story, but basically Part II is concerned with the first "contention" between the houses of York and Lancaster while the title to Part III starts out "The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York" or something like that.

There is also some question about whether is the sole author of the Henry VI plays especially Part I or whether these were the results of some type of collaboration which was apparently not uncommon in the Elizabethean theater.  But the issue for the moment is the issue of the order in which the plays were written regardless of who wrote them.  I am not going to go into the issues or the basis for the various theories about whether Part I preceded or followed Parts II and III, but simply start with Part II.  Previously I have always read them or seen them with Part I first so thinking about them this way will force me to consider what Part II was like if the audience and/or the reader had not seen or read Part I.

So the next time out, probably the middle of next week will be my first post on Part II beginning with Act I, Scene 1.  One other thing, earlier I mentioned what critics thought about the order of composition.  The purpose of this blog is to help me think through my own reactions and ideas.  It is impossible to do that without including the criticism that I have already read, but I am not going to do any further reading of criticism while going through this exercise.  I want to focus on what I think, why I think it and what, if anything I should do about it.