former as an opponent, the two latter as allies of "the great moralist." Malone was the first who gave the subject careful consideration and systematic treatment. To use his own words, he "was long struck with the many evident Shakespearianisms" in the Three Parts of King Henry the Sixth, and did not doubt either that the whole of these plays was the production of the same person,' or that "they were properly ascribed" to Shakespeare. This was Malone's opinion before his edition of Shakespeare's works was published, in 1790; but during the preparation of that edition, he reached an opposite conclusion, and wrote a long dissertation to show that this three-part dramatic history was not Shakespeare's, that it had only been altered and enriched by him, and that the first part was written by another person than the author of the second and third. Malone's arguments were accepted as conclusive, and his opinion prevailed without open dissent, until the appearance of Mr. Knight upon the field of Shakespearian letters. Indeed, Dr. Drake proposed that the First Part of Henry the Sixth should be excluded from future editions of Shakespeare's works, because it offers no trace of any finishing strokes from the master bard." * Mr. Knight opposed himself directly, and upon all points, to Malone and his supporters. He held that Shakespeare, so far from having been the mere furbisher of The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster and The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, the two old plays which are undoubtedly earlier versions of the Second and Third Parts of King Henry the Sixth, was the unaided author of the whole of those old plays or earlier versions, and also of the First Part of King Henry the Sixth, no earlier version or impression of which is known than that of the folio of 1623. Malone had written with much ingenuity; but his argument rested mainly upon mere points of verbal criticism. His examination was minute, but his view was the narrowest that could possibly be taken of the subject; and by this method of treating it he was blinded to so much that was inconsistent with his position, that what was really a failure of perception, seemed, or was easily made to appear, a lack of candor. Mr. Knight, on the contrary, writing upon the subject at great length, and with an enthusiastic fervor nearly equalled in degree by the ability which he displayed, could not be *Shakespeare and his Times, Vol. II. p. 297. reproached with narrow mindedness, although he might be charged with prejudice. He discussed the authorship of these plays almost entirely upon the highest critical grounds; and sought to establish identity of motive, unity of plan, an interdependent dramatic interest, and a homogeneous characterization between all the parts of Henry the Sixth and Richard the Third, an undoubted work of Shakespeare's. From the nature of the question to be decided, it may be doubted whether this mode of discussion was well chosen; and whether, dependent as it was for its arguments upon mere impressions received from the passages compared, impressions which must vary more or less as to character and deepness with various readers, — it could by any disputant have been followed to a satisfactory conclusion. But Mr. Knight certainly did show that some of the most important objections brought by Malone against the First Part of King Henry the Sixth as Shakespeare's work, would apply equally to those passages of the Second and Third Parts of that play, which Malone himself, and all the world besides, acknowledge to be Shakespeare's. Mr. Knight demolished Malone's theory; but he failed to establish his own. He was over subtle; and the connection between his premise and his conclusion is sometimes too filmy and fanciful to be seen by eyes less eager and excited than his own. It may be safely averred, that very few of even the most admiring readers of Mr. Knight's Essay could peruse the First Part of King Henry the Sixth, The First Part of the Contention, and The True Tragedy, and accept those plays as Shakespeare's entirely in plot, characterization, rhythm, and diction; and that they are so is the keystone of Mr. Knight's argument. Soon after Mr. Knight's Essay on King Henry the Sixth, appeared Mr. Collier's edition of the works of Shakespeare, in the Introductory Essays of which to these plays the latter gentleman put forth the monstrous opinion that Shakespeare wrote the First Part of King Henry the Sixth, but was not concerned in the production of the First Part of the Contention, or The True Tragedy. For such an opinion, however, there is support in the external evidence, - aside from the testimony of Heminge and Condell, - and Mr. Collier reasoned logically, though like an antiquary rather than a critic. Next, Mr. Halliwell, editing the Shakespeare Society's reprint of the old plays just named, brought forward in his Prefatory Essay, as a not improbable conjecture, the suggestion that "when these plays were printed in 1594 and 1595, they included the first additions which Shakespeare made to the originals." Mr. Halliwell, also, finding some words and parts of lines in an impression of these plays printed in 1619, which appear in the impression of 1623, but not in those of 1594 and 1595, concluded that there was "an intermediate composition" between the earliest and the latest impressions. But such slight differences as those pointed out by Mr. Halliwell, which are similar to others that I have myself remarked, hardly seem to warrant the conclusion that he drew from them. At the period during which these various impressions appeared, two editions of the same play, even when published within a year or two of each other, were rarely without variations as important, at least, as those in question. Last of all, Mr. Dyce, in his edition of the works of Shakespeare, published in 1857, avows "a strong suspicion that The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy are wholly by Marlowe " an opinion previously broached by Mr. Hallam in his Introduction to the Literature of Europe. Were it desirable, it were quite impossible within the limits at my command, to state, much less to meet, in detail, the arguments of the editors and critics whose views of this subject it seemed proper to bring to the knowledge of the reader, before his attention was solicited to an examination of the question which has led me to a conclusion entirely different from that reached by any of my predecessors in this inquiry.* I will merely remark that Mr. Halliwell's conjecture that the plays which he edited contain Shakespeare's first additions to the [supposed] originals, seems to me by far the most reasonable solution of this interesting literary problem that has yet been offered. It has one point of contact with an opinion which I had formed some two or three years before I met with Mr. Halliwell's excellent reprint of these old plays, and which it is the object of this Essay to set forth and establish. That opinion is, * Malone's Dissertation will be found in the Variorum of 1821, Vol. XVIII. p. 555; Mr. Knight's Essay, in his Pictorial Edition prefixed to Vol. II. of the Histories; Mr. Collier's views, in the Introductory remarks to the three parts, respectively, of Henry the Sixth, in Vol. V. of his edition of Shakespeare of 1842-4; Mr. Halliwell's, in Vol. IV. of the Supplement to Dodsley's Old Plays, published by the Shakespeare Society; and Mr. Dyce's, in Vol. I. p. xlii. of his edition of Shakespeare's Works, 1857. that The First Part of the Contention, The True Tragedy, and, probably, an early form of the First Part of King Henry the Sixth unknown to us, were written by Marlowe, Greene, and Shakespeare (and perhaps Peele) together, not improbably as co-laborers for the company known as the Earl of Pembroke's Servants, soon after the arrival of Shakespeare in London; and that he, in taking passages, and sometimes whole Scenes, from those plays for his King Henry the Sixth, did little more than to reclaim his own. II. The only direct testimony that Shakespeare was the author of the Three Parts of King Henry the Sixth, is that of his fellowactors and copartners, John Heminge and Henry Condell. It is certain that they knew whether these plays were his; for the final chorus to Henry the Fifth bears witness that they had often been performed at the Blackfriars and the Globe. 66 Henry the Sixth in infant bands crown'd King Of France and England, did this King succeed; Whose state so many had the managing, That they lost France, and made his England bleed; And it is equally sure, that when the first folio was published, there were in London many other persons, actors, authors, and play-goers of the better sort, who were sufficiently wellinformed upon the subject to correct the error or expose the fraud of Heminge and Condell, had they committed either, and who would have done so. Ben Jonson would certainly have had something to say upon the subject. But no record or hint of any such denial has been found in the thoroughly sifted literature and private MSS. of the time; and it is therefore clear that Shakespeare's connection with these works as their reputed author, was sufficiently established with his contemporaries for them to be accepted without question as his. And with regard to the First Part of King Henry the Sixth, there is no external evidence of any moment, positive or negative, as to its authorship, except its publication as Shakespeare's in the folio of 1623. As to the authorship of the Second and Third Parts, there are several other points of external evidence which must be taken into consideration. The first is negative. Meres makes no mention of King Henry the Sixth in his citation of the plays of Shakespeare, which he published in 1598. This omission, of course, applies to the First Part as well as to the Second and Third, but not at all in a like degree. For, in that often quoted passage, Meres did not profess to give a catalogue of Shakespeare's then existing plays. He but cited certain of them which occurred to him as justifying the high praise which he bestowed upon their author; and as the Second and Third Parts of King Henry the Sixth contain some of the finest passages written by Shakespeare, and we know that they were popular, the omission of them from a list in which Titus Andronicus appears, goes far to show that as late as 1597 Shakespeare was not known as their author. But the same inference cannot be drawn as to so comparatively a poor a play as the First Part of King Henry the Sixth. The second point is also negative. In the years 1594 and 1595 were published The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, and The True Tragedy of the Duke of York, more than three thousand lines of which, word for word, or modified in language only, are found in the Second and Third Parts of King Henry the Sixth in the folio of 1623, of which latter plays these lines are very nearly two thirds; and yet Shakespeare's name does not appear in the entry on the Stationers' Register or on their title pages as the author of either The First Part of the Contention or The True Tragedy, although in 1594 he had reached eminence as a poet and dramatist; nor, on their republication in 1600, were they announced as his, although after 1598 none of his undoubted plays were published without his name. And more than this: The True Tragedy is announced on the title page of 1595 as having been "sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his seruants"-a company of players with whom Shakespeare had no direct connection that we know of from other sources, and which is never mentioned on the title pages of the early editions of any of his unmistakable and undisputed works. It was not until 1619, three years after Shakespeare's death, that these plays were published as his by a bookseller, Thomas Pavier, who did the same with Sir John Oldcastle, A Yorkshire Tragedy, The Puritan, and other plays which we know were not his. These circumstances strongly |