Holinshed's Chronicles, also known as Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, is a collaborative work published in several volumes and two editions, the first edition in 1577, and the second in 1587. It was a large, comprehensive description of British history published in three volumes.
The title page of the 1577 first edition of Holinshed's Chronicles
Title page of the second edition
In the First Folio, the plays of William Shakespeare were grouped into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies. The histories—along with those of contemporary Renaissance playwrights—help define the genre of history plays. The Shakespearean histories are biographies of English kings of the previous four centuries and include the standalones King John, Edward III and Henry VIII as well as a continuous sequence of eight plays. These last are considered to have been composed in two cycles. The so-called first tetralogy, apparently written in the early 1590s, covers the Wars of the Roses saga and includes Henry VI, Parts I, II & III and Richard III. The second tetralogy, finished in 1599 and including Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I & II and Henry V, is frequently called the Henriad after its protagonist Prince Hal, the future Henry V.
Opening page of the First Folio King John
'Henry VII crowned at Bosworth', by Richard Caton Woodville Jr.—a key moment in the 'Tudor myth'
'Joan of Arc conjures demons in Shakespeare's Henry VI' (engraving by C. Warren, 1805, after J. Thurston). "Next to her, Talbot is a blundering oaf, who furiously attributes her success to sorcery, whereas the audience knows that she has simply outfoxed him by superior military strategy." – H. A. Kelly (1970)
'Falstaff', (Adolfo Hohenstein)—according to Danby, "in every sense, the bigger man" than Hal