STC 21006a copy 1, title page
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Creator: William Shakespeare
Title: The true tragedie of Richarde Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the sixt: vvith the whole contention betweene the two houses, Lancaster and Yorke; as it was sundry times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his seruantes.
Date: Printed at Londou [sic] : By W[illiam]. W[hite]. for Thomas Millington, and are to be sold at his shoppe vnder Saint Peters Church in Cornewall, 1600.
Repository: Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, USA
Call number and opening: STC 21006a copy 1, title page
View online bibliographic record
Terms of use
Images that are under Folger copyright are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This allows you to use our images without additional permission provided that you cite the Folger Shakespeare Library as the source and you license anything you create using the images under the same or equivalent license. For more information, including permissions beyond the scope of this license, see Permissions. The Folger waives permission fees for non-commercial publication by registered non-profits, including university presses, regardless of the license they use. For images copyrighted by an entity other than the Folger, please contact the copyright holder for permission information.
Creator: William Shakespeare
Title: The true tragedie of Richarde Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the sixt: vvith the whole contention betweene the two houses, Lancaster and Yorke; as it was sundry times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his seruantes.
Date: Printed at Londou [sic] : By W[illiam]. W[hite]. for Thomas Millington, and are to be sold at his shoppe vnder Saint Peters Church in Cornewall, 1600.
Repository: Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, USA
Call number and opening: STC 21006a copy 1, title page
View online bibliographic record
Matthew Vadnais, "Henry VI Part 3, second edition," Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/260.
Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 21006a copy 1, title page. See Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/260.
This is the second edition of The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, now known as Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 3. Typically referred to as “Q2,” or second quarto, this is technically the play’s first quarto edition, as the 1595 edition was an octavo (a smaller format).
Like the first edition, this version was printed independently of the other plays that would become the Henry VI trilogy. However, Henry VI was originally considered a two part play comprised of The First Part of The Contention (1594)-- which would become Henry VI Part 2—and this text. In fact, the two plays were collected and printed in 1619 as The Whole Contention, but Henry VI Part 1 and the contemporary trilogy arrangement did not appear in print until the 1623 First Folio, where this play appeared titled as The Third Part of Henry the Sixt for the first time. The True Tragedy first appeared in the Stationers’ Register on April 19, 1602 when Thomas Millington transferred the rights to “The First and Second parte of henry the vjt ii bookes” to Thomas Pavier.
This edition of the play is nearly identical to its earlier incarnation, and both are significantly shorter than the version printed in the First Folio.
The copy shown here is part of the Folger Shakespeare Library collection and is one of nine surviving copies of this edition recorded in the English Short Title Catalogue.
To learn more about the plot of the play, please visit the Henry VI Part 3 page on the Folger's Shakespeare's Works and the British Library’s Shakespeare in Quarto, which also includes information about another copy of this edition.
Written by Matthew Vadnais
Sources
Brooke, Tucker. “Elizabethan Proof Corrections in a Copy of “The First Part of the Contention” 1600.” The Huntington Library Bulletin (1931) 2: 87-89.
DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks. Ed. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser. Created 2007.
Manley, Lawrence. “From Strange’s Men to Pembroke’s Men: 2 “Henry VI” and the First Part of the Contention.” Shakespeare Quarterly (2003) 54 (3): 253-287.
Last updated April 26, 2020
