HENRY VI.

"I do think, a king! I would not so!"-Tempest.

It will perhaps avoid repetition if the three parts of Henry VI. be treated together; and clearness may be gained by giving, at the beginning, a list of the chronological facts upon which any argument about them must be founded. Let it be noted, by way of explanation, that Part I. did not appear in print till 1623; that Part II. is founded on the play entitled The First Part of the Contention, &c.; and Part III. is similarly due to The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke.

1592. Henslowe's Diary informs us that in this year at the newly-opened Rose Theatre, Lord Strange's Company acted a play called Henry the VI. On the same information, we know that this play was frequently performed afterwards.

1592. In the same year, appeared Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, &c., in which there is the following well-known reference to Shakespeare: "Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger's heart wrapt in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrie."

1592. In the same year also, Thomas Nashe, in his Pierce Penniless, &c., dwelling upon "the plays borrowed out of our English chronicles," says: "How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had been two hundred years in his tomb he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators (at least at several

times) who, in the tragedian that represents his person, behold him fresh bleeding.”

1592. Yet, once more, in this year probably Marlowe produced his Edward II. (containing many passages identical with others in The Contention and The True Tragedie). This play was not printed till 1598.

1593. H. Chettle (Kind Harts Dreame) apologised for the abusive passage1 in Greene's book, which he had edited the year before.

1593. March 12th; Tho. Millington entered on the Stationers Register "a booke intituled the firste parte of the contention of the twoo famous Houses of York and Lancaster," &c. ; and in

1594. A 12mo. edition, bearing this title, appeared; "printed by T. Creede for T. Millington."

1595. There appeared an octavo, entitled "The true tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the Death of good

I How keenly Shakespeare resented this abusive passage may be seen by the following circumstances. Chettle says: Greene's letter "is offensively by one or two of them taken; and because on the dead they cannot be avenged, they wilfully forge in their conceits a living author; and after tossing it to and fro, no remedy, but it must light on me; "he then offers a most ample apology to one of those offended (undoubtedly Shakespeare). But that Shakespeare did not forget the insult may perhaps be inferred from his use of the word beautified, which Greene had used in the old saying about the crow and the feathers: the only undoubted cases, in which he employs the word, are in Hamlet (written some few years afterwards) ii. 2, where we are told that beautified is "an ill phrase, a vile phrase; 'beautified' is a vile phrase ;" and in the nearly contemporary Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet, where also the use seems satirical. The passages referred to are: Romeo and Juliet, i. 4, 87, 88, where Lady Capulet in some almost doggerel verse says:

"This precious book of love, this unbound lover,

To beautify him, only wants a cover;

and Two Gentlemen of Verona, iv. 1, 55—58, when Valentine's services are accepted by the men, whom he meets in the forest:

"-Partly seeing you are beautified,

With goodly shape and by your own report

A linguist and a man of such perfection
As we do in our quality much want.

Surely Shakespeare, in these lines, has drawn his own picture, sportively adopting the remarks that were being made about him, for notice that just at this same time, Chettle repeats the obnoxious word at the beginning of his preface (1593); Shakespeare brings out his Venus and Adonis with a learned motto (1593); and Chettle says of him "myself have seen his demeanour no ess civill, than he exelent in the qualitie he professes" (1593)..

King Henry the Sixt, with the whole Contention betweene the two Houses Lancaster and Yorke, as it was sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his Servants;" the publisher was the same Millington mentioned above.

1598. Meres, in his list of Shakespeare's plays (which includes Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., King John, and even Titus Andronicus), does not mention Henry VI.

1599. Shakespeare concluded his epilogue to his Henry V. with these lines :

'Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned 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: Which oft our stage hath shown: and, for their sake, In your fair minds let this acceptance take."

1600. Millington brought out a second edition of The True Tragedie, &c., and of The Contention.

1602. There is the following entry on the Stationers' Register, for April 19th :—

:

"Tho. Pavier] by Assignt. from Tho. Millington salvo jure cujuscumq. The 1st and 2nd pts. of Henry the VI. : ii. books."

1619. There appeared "The Whole Contention between the two Famous Houses of Lancaster and Yorke, &c. Divided into two Parts; and newly corrected and enlarged. Written by William Shakespeare, Gent. Printed by T. P."

The initials are doubtless those of the Thomas Pavier above mentioned.

1623. On Nov. 8th, Blount and Jaggard entered among other "copies" of Shakespeare's works "not formerly entered to other men: "the Thirde Parte of Henry the Sixt."

1623. In the folio edition, which these and other publishers brought out under the care of Heminge and Condell,

the three parts are printed and arranged as we have them

now.

1626. Pavier transferred his "rights in Shakespeare's plays or any of them," to Brewster and Birde; and in

1630, on the 8th of November, Bird assigned them (with "consent of a full court") to Ric. Cotes; among the plays thus transferred we have Yorke and Lancaster.

PART I.

From the above data, the following opinions are deduced :

The epilogue of Henry V. tells us three things: (1) that all the three parts of Henry VI. are alluded to (for that the Ist part is referred to follows from the lines "whose state so many had the managing that they lost France;" and, that the other two parts are remembered we know, among other reasons, from the plural in "for their sake"); (2) that these parts had been produced some time before 1599 ("which oft our stage hath shown"); and (3) that Shakespeare himself had had a share at least in their production ("and, for their sake, In your fair minds let this acceptance take").

That Shakespeare was not the sole author of Part I. is almost certain, as well from the style and the allusions (see p. 121), as from the facts that Meres does not refer to it (1598) and that no edition of it appeared until the First Folio came out (1623).

It may be here remarked, and the remark should be compared with a similar one upon King John, that the play follows Holinshed's Chronicles; but not with that particularity which we have in Shakespeare's later historical plays. It should be noticed too, as one of the marks, that I Henry VI. and 2 and 3 Henry VI. are not of the same origin, that in the two latter plays Hall is consulted rather than Holinshed.

It seems, again, extremely probable that the quotation above taken from Nash (1592), refers either to this part, or to the older play upon which it was founded. The words applied to Talbot, “the terror of the French," are found in i. 4, 42. “Here," said they, "is the terror of the French;" see also ii. 3, 24; iv. 2, 16; and iv. 7, 78; and the word "triumph" recalls the end of the sad scene of Act iii., and La Pucelle's words, "Let frantic Talbot triumph for a while;" whilst the remark about "the spectators beholding him fresh bleeding" vividly reminds us of the beginning of Act iv. Sc. 7.

If the reference be to Shakespeare's play, we thus have a revision, in 1592, of the older play; it may be, too, that this is "the Henry the VI." produced (according to Henslowe) in that year by Lord Strange's Company, which Shakespeare was probably originally a member of, and which was merged into the Lord Chamberlain's Company in 1594, as Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps has lately shown.

This part is called "the Thirde Parte of Henry the Sixt" in the entry on the Stationers' Register in 1623; for it was not till its present arrangement was adopted in the first folio, that the alteration was made; this statement, which is confirmed by T. Pavier's artful entry on the 19th of April, 1602, may be taken as another proof of the separate origins of this part and of the other two. Another proof of this is the fact that the name of Talbot, which is always in our ears or before our eyes in Part I., is never even mentioned in either of the others.

Mr. Fleay says: "Certainly before 1592, when acted by Lord Strange's men at the Rose. The Chamberlain's Company had it before 1599. See Epilogue to Henry V.”— [Shakespeare Manual, p. 31.]

Mr. R. Simpson [New Shakspere's Society's Transactions, 1874, vol. ii., pp. 421, 422] says that Suffolk is Leicester; he supports his identification by quoting a passage from Morgan's Leicester's Commonwealth, where Elizabeth is