chronicles, Grafton's and Stowe's and Holinshed's, with the earlier narrative of Halle and the versified “tragedies” of The Mirror for Magistrates, supplied it with ample material. And the alarums and excursions, the roll of drums and the trampling of armies, which enlivened its scenes, were doubtless sufficient to compensate, in the eyes of audiences none too critical, for the episodic character of its action and the lack of that beginning, middle and end, which the stricter canons of dramatic art demand.

Shakespeare, of course, came to the chronicle history late, and his was the task of refurbishing its decadence and endeavouring to find some principle of unity whereby to hold together its slovenly and dissolute structure. In the Lancaster tetralogy he seems to have had a fairly free hand, and to have tried a variety of stylistic experiments, of which the most successful was certainly the bold introduction of anachronistic comedy with Falstaff, in the course of a continuous endeavour to work out a general theme based upon the interpretation of history as a series of contrasted studies in kingship. But in King John, and still more throughout the greater part of the Yorkist tetralogy which went before, he was far more closely fettered by his models, although in Richard the Third he was able to break sufficiently loose to produce a play which, however much it may owe in temper to Marlowe, is at least an independent

work of art. The debt of Richard the Third to the crude old plays upon which it was probably intended to be built is insignificant enough. The same can hardly be said of Henry the Sixth, throughout the last two parts of which we can see the journeyman playwright painfully tinkering scene by scene at the chronicle history before him, while it may at least be suspected that the first part itself was produced by a very similar process. For unity, therefore, for definite dramatic purpose, it will not do to look too closely in these plays. If you find it at all, it is in the constant sense of disunion as the one fatal element in national life, and of the implied contrast, which the chronicles themselves were indeed written to suggest, between the rudderless state of an England deprived of its natural leader and the glorious possibilities of a Henry of Monmouth or a Henry Tudor. The flame of patriotism burns still in the scenes which celebrate the prowess of Lord Shrewsbury, and Thomas Nash records the response which these scenes evoked when they were produced, probably with Edward Alleyn in the part of Shrewsbury, upon the boards of the Rose in the spring of 1592.

“How would it haue ioyed braue Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyen two hundred yeare in his Toomb, he should triumph againe on the Stage and haue his bones new embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times) who, in the

Tragedian that represents his person, imagine that they behold him fresh bleeding.” In this desire to make the dead past live again, rather than in any psychological formula of the tragic or the comic vision, lies the real meaning of the chronicle play.

Sentimental persons have sometimes professed to be shocked at the inglorious part assigned to Joan of Arc in Henry the Sixth, and have consoled themselves with the reflection that Shakespeare was dependent upon

his sources, and that, if he depicted the Maid as a wanton and a practiser with evil spirits, this was only because he found her so represented in the chronicles and had no material for arriving at a truer historic judgment. Certainly the process of rehabilitation was not before Shakespeare, and the argument is sound as far as it goes.

But it rather begs the question by assuming that Shakespeare or any other English national playwright would have cared very much whether he was unjust to a French heroine or not. It was the quality of England, not of France, that he set out to celebrate, and surely we have had example enough in recent years that patriotic fervour is by no means always touched with the quixotic generosities of a Sidney, and is frequently accompanied by the very natural desire to make out its enemies as no better than they should be.

E. K. CHAMBERS. June, 1907

new

The First Part of Henry the Sixth was entered upon the Stationers' Register on November 8, 1623, together with such of Shakespeare's other plays as were not already in print, for the purposes of the First Folio of the collected plays published in that year. In the entry it appears as “the thirde parte of Henry ye Sixt”, but this is only because the two later parts were, from the booksellers' point of view, already in existence. Obviously the play is of early date, and there seems no reason to hesitate in identifying it with the “harey the vj” recorded in Henslowe's Diary to have been produced by Lord Strange's men, probably at the Rose, as a enterlude" on March 3, 1592. The Talbot scenes are alluded to by Nash in his Pierce Penilesse His Supplication of the same year. One may doubt, however, whether the play was really “new”, except in the sense that certain fresh scenes, probably including the Talbot scenes (act v, scc. 2–7) and possibly also the York and Lancaster scenes (act ii, scc. 4, 5), had been written into it for Henslowe. The Shakespearean authorship of Henry the Sixth has long been in dispute, and it is conceivable that Shakespeare's contribution to the First Part may have been limited to the writing of these scenes. He must have had something to do with all three parts or they would hardly have got into the First Folio. On the other hand, the fact that they are omitted from the list of his plays given in the Palladis Tamia of Francis Meres (1598) suggests that Meres at any rate did not regard them as substantially his work.

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