Ohgoodness. It is going to be difficult to give this a proper review, because it's as though you took my prompts and you said, 'very well, yes, I see what Gil likes, and I shall write all of that.' This is an intensely visual piece, which works quite well--I love Warwick's bright velvets and the starkness of stars and snow and Margaret cradling Suffolk's head like Salome and John on his knees to beg for mercy, and OH GOD THE HERALDRY, YOU KNOW HOW I ADORE HERALDRY, YOU SPLENDID PERSON YOU. I adore the almost hypnotic fascination that Warwick holds for John, the power that he wields and that he represents; I adore the multiple deflections that John performs as he tries to understand what he is being compelled toward, reflecting his curiosity through Edward and Henry VI and Robert de Vere. More than anything else, that slow and half-conscious seeking appeals to me; I adore how John seeks not so much to prove himself as to know, because that's a much more complicated and fascinating growing-up story. It isn't that he learns to trust Warwick, or not to trust Warwick, because by the end Warwick isn't even a part of his rubric for self-knowledge. I love most of all the complex relationship between victory and surrender that you've woven through the story--because these plays are all about failures in victory, failures of victory, grace in surrender, denials of mercy. It's one of the themes that I find most compelling in the Henry VI plays, and you've done masterful work with it.

Just. WOW.