Henslowe's Diary records the performance by Lord Strange's men at the Rose Theatre of a new (‘ne’) play on 3 March 1592, entitled ‘Harey the vj’. This was sufficiently popular to be repeated another thirteen times that year, and twice in January 1593. That this is our play seems guaranteed by a passage in Nashe's Pierce Penilesse (entered S.R. August 1592), which, exactly fits the 1623 F. 1 Henry VI, with its Talbot scenes and its repeated use of Hall's name for Talbot, ‘the terror of the French’, also quoted by Nashe. It is in the last degree improbable that there was another Henry VI which enjoyed the triumph attested by Nashe, while a similarly popular play, regarded by Heminge and Condell in 1623 as Shakespearian, and sharing with it such marked features, was acted elsewhere by another company, and remained unrecorded.

At the outset then, our play had a considerable vogue in London. But this was as transient as it was striking, and after the sixteenth century the play has been less frequently shown than almost any other in the canon. A single performance in the eighteenth century, one in the nineteenth, and two in the twentieth make up the complete story of the genuine Elizabethan play on the English stage; in America it has been acted once, a few years ago.

On 13 March 1738 it was shown at Covent Garden, ‘by desire’, says Genest, ‘of several Ladies of Quality’ for Delane's benefit.