they are cloy'd With long continuance in a settled place' (II. v. 104-106); To wall thee from the liberty of flight' (IV. ii. 24); ‘girdled with a waist of iron' (IV. iii. 20); 'ring'd about with bold adversity' (IV. iv. 14); 'Now thou art seal'd the son of chivalry' (IV. vi. 29); "To save a paltry life and slay bright fame' (IV. vi. 45); "Triumphant death, smear'd with captivity' (IV. vii. 3); ‘inhearsed in the arms Of the most bloody nurser of his harms' (IV. vii. 46); "Twinkling another counterfeited beam' (V. iii. 63). Consideration of the passages just cited, which are fairly representative, though of course not complete, will, I think, suggest a gradual decrease through the scenes concerned in the recognizable Shakespearean quality. The Temple Garden and Mortimer scenes are rather more positively like Shakespeare than the blank verse Talbot passages, and decidedly more so than the rimed Talbot passages (IV. iii. 28-46, IV. v. 16-vii. 50) or the Suffolk-Margaret scene. This is reasonable, since the first two scenes bear most appearance of being spontaneous with the reviser of the play, and since Shakespeare's language is regularly bolder in blank verse than in rime. It would be hazardous to attempt to infer from the style alone the date at which Shakespeare wrote his scenes.1 The diction does not seem to me that of the poet's earliest period; and Furnivall has observed that the proportion of extra-syllabled lines in the Temple Garden scene (about 26 per cent) 'forbids us supposing it is very early work.' It would also be ill-advised to set precise limits for Shakespeare's part in the play. His hand is most evident in the scenes just discussed, but Talbot's death must, I think, have been a conspicuous feature of the original preShakespearean play, and it is unlikely that the reviser here removed all traces of his predecessor. On 1 See the Appendix on The History of the Play, p. 134. the other hand, it is entirely reasonable to suspect Shakespearean penciling in scenes where the handling is too light or too perfunctory to leave any definite impression of genius. In particular, Mr. Gray finds evidence of the greater writer in the opening of III. i and in the Vernon-Basset quarrel (III. iv. 28 ff. and IV. i. 78 ff.). I am impressed by Henneman's suggestion that IV. i as a whole is the reviser's replica of III. iv (cf. note on IV. i): there seems to be nothing in the later scene which Shakespeare might not have written, and a positive clue may perhaps be found in the fact that Talbot's account of the Battle of Patay is here certainly taken from Holinshed rather than Halle.1 Another hint of the same kind appears in I. ii in the adoption from Holinshed's second edition of the favorable view of Joan of Arc (which Holinshed explains that he derives from French sources), whereas the remainder of the play gives an inharmonious conception drawn from the earlier English chronicles.2 The reviser's hand, presumably Shakespeare's, is evident in the way the close of 1 Henry VI is shaped to fit it as an introduction to Part II of the trilogy. Henneman states the relationship of the three parts with accuracy, if with undue caution: 'So specifically does I prepare for II and III in certain particulars that it is conceivable that I was written after II and that III had already been planned.' If he means in 1 Holinshed reports that Talbot had 'not past six thousand men' (cf. IV. i. 20 and also I. i. 112), while Halle gives him five thousand. 2 Two small points, which I have not seen mentioned, may have some bearing on the date of Shakespeare's revision: (1) The Mortimer scene, especially lines 67-81, sounds rather like a reminiscence of 1 Henry IV. (2) Margaret's vain efforts to make Suffolk attend to her questions and the retribution she takes (V. iii. 72-109) repeat Falstaff's tactics with the Chief Justice (2 Henry IV, II. i. 184-211). It is possible, but hardly so likely, that the sequence was the other way. the case of Part I, not the original composition, but the reviser's adaptation, it is certain, I think, that I follows II. Note that the thirty-ninth line of the play, where Winchester says to Gloucester, 'Thy wife is proud; she holdeth thee in awe,' can only be rationally explained as a preparation for Part II. The gibe means nothing as regards Part I. Again, the conclusion of Part I can only have been worked into an open advertisement for Part II, 'Margaret shall now be queen, and rule the king; after Parts II and III had passed into the possession of Shakespeare's company, and been adapted for representation by them. The 1592 Harry the Sixth cannot well be imagined to have ended so, for Pembroke's company appear at this time to have owned the early versions of Parts II and III. It is not reasonable that Strange's company should have employed a conclusion quite out of keeping with their main theme of Talbot's glory and explicable only as preparing the audience for the play of a rival company. That the original ending of the play was greatly changed by the reviser appears from textual evidence, which Fleay with characteristic subtlety noted, and, I think, characteristically misinterpreted. The marking of acts and scenes in the only early edition—that of the Folio-is entirely regular as far as the close of Act III (save that the individual scenes of Acts I and II are not divided off); and it is extraordinarily chaotic in Acts IV and V. Practically the whole close of the play (from IV. i through V. iv) is given 1 Pembroke's Men are supposed to have sold these plays and others at the time of their distress in September, 1593a year and a half after Strange's (Shakespeare's) Men produced Harry the Sixth. Cf. Greg, Henslowe's Diary, ii. 85; Murray, English Dram. Companies, i. 65. (I do not agree with Murray's suggestion of a possible connection between Shakespeare and the Pembroke company.) as Act IV, Act V consisting only of the short last scene (V. v), and being marked at all probably merely in order to secure the conventional total of five acts. The six scenes dealing with Talbot's death (IV. ii-vii) are undivided and carelessly tacked on to IV. i, with which they have only a remote organic connection. From this Fleay argues that the Talbot scenes are a patch of new material, not corresponding to anything in the old play: 'It is plain that they were written subsequently to the rest of the play and inserted at a revival. They had to be inserted in such a manner as not to break the connection between this play and 2 Henry VI; and were put in the most convenient place, regardless of historic sequence.' I think the reverse is true: that it was the necessity of creating a spurious connection with 2 Henry VI which produced the disorder. Originally the Talbot scenes probably came nearer the end of the play and stood in closer relationship to their natural complement, the retributive overthrow of Joan (V. ii, iii. 1-44, iv. 1-93) and the final submission of the Dauphin (V. iv. 116-175). On this unhistorical, but very dramatic note of national vindication the old play may be supposed to have concluded. To change this note to that of pessimism and foreboding with which Part II opens was the reviser's problem.1 It required a complete volte-face, which has been executed with dexterity but probably at a cost to the effectiveness of this play (considered individually and not as the introduction to a great tetralogy) for which Shakespeare's improvement of the poetry in the Talbot scenes does not compensate. The patchwork is most painfully evident where the otherwise admirable Suffolk-Margaret-Reignier scene (V. iii. 45-195) is pasted in between two sections of the Joan story. 1 The clearest indication of an effort to prepare the audience for this new gloom in the close appears in the croaking speeches of Exeter, affixed to III. i and IV. i. The last scene in the play, constituting the entire Actus Quintus of the Folio, clearly belongs altogether to the later recension. The writing of so purely utilitarian a scene was small game for Shakespeare, but the execution is by no means un-Shakespearean.1 Henneman's summary of Shakespeare's probable purpose in 1 Henry VI is, I think, fair and conservative: "To work up or rewrite the Talbot portions of the Chronicles, probably, though not necessarily, already crystallized into an old play on the triumph of "brave Talbot" over the French, which possessed the hated Joan of Arc scenes and all; to intensify the figure and character of Talbot; to work over or add scenes like those touching Talbot's death; to connect him with the deplorable struggles of the nobles; to invent, by a happy poetical thought, the origin of the factions of the Red and White Roses in the Temple Garden; to sound at once the note of weakness in the king continued in the succeeding Parts, and thus convert the old Talbot material effectually into a Henry VI drama; and to close with the wooing of Margaret as specific introduction to Part II,-something like this seems the task that the dramatist set himself to perform.' II. THE AUTHOR OF THE ORIGINAL PLAY 1. Marlowe ? Henslowe's play of Harry the Sixth, if it followed somewhat the lines just suggested, undoubtedly deserved the popularity it attained. It was probably more effective on the stage than the expanded work which supplanted it, and in 1591-92 can have been 1 Gervinus pointed out (Shakespeare, 2d ed., 1850, i. 202) that if the Suffolk-Margaret scene and the last scene were omitted, and the play left to close with 'Winchester's peace' (V. iv), it would have a conclusion much better suited to the chief content. |