SummaryThe plays of the First Tetralogy are experimental in so far as Shakespeare manipulates, with varying success, a wide range of mythically propertied material. These plays, from a mythological point of view, do not stand as remarkable achievements of coherence or vision, but they do reveal a double potential. Firstly, the meaning of some of Shakespeare's imagery and allusion hinges on a mechanism of “two‐way” significance in which a single figure assumes competing connotations. Secondly, these differing interpretations appear to fall into two well‐defined, though not unrelated, mythological schemes. The English myth conceives cf a paradisial England, free of civil war and committed to foreign conquest; the anti‐myth describes an England torn asunder by internal strife and lacking in the heroic qualities of the English