WOMAN: It is unlikely that Shakespeare started out with the intention of writing a great historical cycle, when composing the tetralogies dramatising the rise and fall of a century of English Kings, from the accession of Richard II in 1377 to the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. The plays were not written in chronological order, and many challenge the opinion that they can even be said to represent a coherent historical point of view. Shakespeare's approach is even considered by some to be fragmented, kaleidoscopic, highly complicated, and oven random at times. It is true that the plays are written in widely different styles, and yet there certainly exists a narrative continuity from play to play, with frequent references from one to another But it's more than a question of narrative: only by seeing the plays in sequence can we appreciate that sense, always so strong in Shakespeare, of time and chance, of characters both as individuals and as pawns, caught in nets cast by history and themselves casting nets that will in turn entangle their successors. As a result, audiences come away with the exhausted feeling of having lived through something.