Preparing for Shakespeare's History Plays

As next week (Jan 24-28, 2011) our class will be studying the history plays, it would be wise to prepare a bit. Here are my suggestions.

• Understand the Renaissance Background
  Read "The Political and Religious Background" from the General Introduction in our textbook (Bevington's Essential Shakespeare, pp. xviii-xxv). It is vital to understand the dominant ideas about politics, monarchy, etc. from the Renaissance in order to understand Shakespeare's history plays.
• Explore the Sources
  From Appendix 2 in our text (p. A-14), find the play(s) you are reading and find out the sources Shakespeare used. You might also use the Shakespeare Online site's short summaries of sources. One of the most common sources for the history plays was Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The image embedded here links to the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image site where the complete Holinshed can be viewed through hi-def pictures.  Too hard to read? See the plain text versions on Project Gutenberg. 
• Preview
  I recommend using an authoritative site like the Folger Shakespeare Library, which provides brief scholarly overviews of all the plays, including the history plays, plus images of the original texts and often nice illustrations, too. And of course, the introduction to each play within our text is a good starting place.