up against men who don't. They justify their behaviour by invoking the great sanctions – God, the King, Parliament, the People – that unscrupulous statesmen, motivated by the naked desire to be on top, have used throughout the ages. Here is the central irony of the play: Henry's Christian goodness produces evil." In order to capture this sense of innocence, Barton and Hall took what was considered a huge risk - casting an inexperienced twenty-two-year-old actor as Henry; David Warner. The gamble paid off, and Warner's Henry was one of the most celebrated performances in the piece, helping to establish both Warner the actor and Henry the character. Harold Hobson wrote in The Sunday Times that Warner "discovers in Henry one of Shakespeare's greatest parts. The discovery is the more exciting for being improbable, since drama gives its principal opportunities to active men. Henry is never active [...] He suffers only, and endures, never resisting, never striking back [...] Yet [Warner's] sad, distressed face, meeting each new misfortune with an absolute absence of protest or indignation, spreads over the darkest waters of the play a quiet and persistent golden glory." Speaking of Henry's death, in which he gently kisses Richard after being mortally stabbed, The Observers Kenneth Tynan wrote "I have seen nothing more Christ-like in modern theatre." Writing in the Signet Classics Shakespeare edition of 1 Henry VI in 1967, Lawrence V. Ryan remarked that "unlike the almost featureless, nearly imbecilic Henry of historical legend and of earlier productions [...] Warner showed the king as growing from youthful naiveté and subservience to the intriguers around him into a man of perception and personal integrity entrapped in and lamenting a world of violence not of his own making." In his 2001 Oxford Shakespeare edition of 3 Henry VI, Randall Martin writes "Warner created a painfully shy, physically awkward, but ultimately saintly figure, who passed through agonies of doubt before reaching a Christ-like serenity. He characterised Henry above all through qualities of deep piety and lost innocence." Another lauded performance was that of Peggy Ashcroft as Margaret, whose role is usually heavily cut, and often eliminated entirely from both 1 Henry VI and, especially, Richard III. Margaret is the only character to appear in all four plays (unless one counts the Ghost of Henry VI in Richard III), and Ashcroft relished the chance to develop the character over the entire production,