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"O pity, God, this miserable age," declares a father who has killed his own son in the heat of battle in Shakespeare's Henry VI part III. It is an all too appropriate verdict on the whole grim span of the Wars of the Roses, much romanticised at the safe distance of more than five centuries but in reality containing some of the bloodiest times in the history of the English people. The distraught father speaks his lines at the battle of Towton , the scene of immense carnage in 1461, and this past weekend he actually spoke them on the field of Towton itself, near York, as actors from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre gave the first of four planned "battlefield performances" of the Bard's Henry VI trilogy on, or as close as practicable to, the sites where the battles that feature in the plays took place. Next up is a performance at Tewkesbury on 4 August, followed by St Albans and finally Barnet, where Warwick the Kingmaker perished in 1471."O pity, God, this miserable age," declares a father who has killed his own son in the heat of battle in Shakespeare's Henry VI part III. It is an all too appropriate verdict on the whole grim span of the Wars of the Roses, much romanticised at the safe distance of more than five centuries but in reality containing some of the bloodiest times in the history of the English people. The distraught father speaks his lines at the battle of Towton , the scene of immense carnage in 1461, and this past weekend he actually spoke them on the field of Towton itself, near York, as actors from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre gave the first of four planned "battlefield performances" of the Bard's Henry VI trilogy on, or as close as practicable to, the sites where the battles that feature in the plays took place. Next up is a performance at Tewkesbury on 4 August, followed by St Albans and finally Barnet, where Warwick the Kingmaker perished in 1471.
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