LITERARY HISTORY.

The connection between the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI. is so close that we have thought it best, as far as the Introduction is concerned, not to treat them separately. With regard to the sources whence they are derived, the literary history of these plays is very clear. We have more than one edition of the two old plays from which the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI., as they were first published in the Folio of 1623, were adapted by Shakespeare. As to the authorship of these two plays, whether they were the work of one, or more than one author, a controversy has been going on ever since the days of Malone; and will go on most probably till the end of time. The theory that they are merely imperfect copies of the two latter Parts of Henry VI., as we have them in the Folio 1623, is quite untenable. It seems beyond dispute that the Second Part of Henry VI. is an adaptation of a play first printed in quarto (Q. 1)1 in 1594, and called "The | First part of the Con- tention betwixt the two famous houses of Yorke | and Lancaster, with the death of the good | Duke Humphrey: | And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Tacke Cade: | And the Duke of Yorkes first claime vnto the Crowne. | LONDON | Printed by Thomas Creed, for Thomas Millington, and are to be sold at his shop vnder Saint Peters | Church in Cornwall. | 1594.." The Cambridge edd. in their preface (p. vii) to I. Henry VI., say: "The only

copy known of this edition is in the Bodleian

1 Stokes describes it as "A 12mo edition" (p. 6); but it is always described as a small quarto. It was entered on the Register of Stationers' Hall on March 12th, 1593–94.

Library (Malone, Add. 870), and is probably the same which was once in Malone's possession, and which he collated with the second Quarto printed in 1600."

In his preface to the reprint of The Contention and The True Tragedy, edited by him for the Shakespeare Society, and again reprinted by Hazlitt in his Shakespeare Library (pt. 2, vols. i. ii.), Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps doubts that the Bodleian copy is the same as the one in Malone's possession. The Cambridge edd. give their reasons at length, reasons which are perfectly satisfactory, for believing that Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps was mistaken. At any rate no trace of the existence of any other edition of this play has been found.

The second edition (Q. 2) of the First Part of The Contention appeared in quarto, in 1600, with the following title: "The First part of the Con- tention betwixt the two famous houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the | death of the good Duke | Humphrey: | And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the tragicall end of the prowd Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Iacke Cade: | And the Duke of Yorkes first clayme to the Crowne. | LONDON | Printed by Valentine Simmes for Thomas Millington, and are to be sold at his shop vnder S. Peters church in Cornewall. | 1600." The Cambridge edd. say (p. ix) "Copies with this title are in the library of the Duke of Devonshire, and in the Bodleian (Malone, 867). An imperfect copy, wanting the last seven leaves, is in the Capell collection. Another impression bearing the same date, 'Printed by W. W. for Thomas Millington,' is said to exist, but we have been unable to find it." The only evidence of the existence of this edition is a MS. title, prefixed to a copy of Q. 2 in the Bodleian (Malone 36), which Mr.

Halliwell-Phillipps seems to have mistaken for a separate edition. We are indebted to the careful collation by the Cambridge Editors of this copy with that in the Capell collection for the establishment of the fact that it is not a separate edition.

In 1619 a third edition (Q. 3) without date, printed by Isaac Jaggard, and comprising also "The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York,” appeared with the following title: "The | Whole Contention betweene the two Famous Houses, LANCASTER and | YORKE. | With the Tragicall ends of the good Duke | Humfrey, Richard Duke of Yorke, | and King Henrie the sixt. Diuided into two Parts; And newly corrected and enlarged. Written by William Shake- | speare, Gent. | Printed at LONDON, for T. P. | "

In 1595 The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (quoted as Q. 1), upon which III. Henry VI. is indisputably based, was published in small 8vo, with the following title: "The | true Tragedie of Richard | Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the whole contention betweene | the two Houses Lancaster and Yorke, as it was sundrie times

acted by the Right Honoura- | ble the Earl of Pem- brooke his seruants. Printed at London by P. S. for Thomas Millington, and are to be sold at his shoppe vnder | Saint Peters Church in | Cornwal, 1595."

In 1600 the second edition (Q. 2) was published with the following title: "The True Tragedie of Richarde Duke of Yorke, and the death of good | King Henrie the Sixt: | With the whole contention betweene the two Houses, Lancaster and Yorke; as it was sundry times acted by the Right | Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his seruantes. Printed at London by W. W. for Thomas Millington, | and are to be sold at his shoppe vnder Saint Peters Church in Cornewall. | 1600. |" The Cambridge edd. (p. x) say, "Copies of this edition are in the Duke of Devonshire's Library, the Bodleian (Malone, 36), and the British Museum."

The third edition (Q. 3) of The True Tragedy, forming the second part of The Whole Contention, instead of title-page bears the heading, "The Second Part. | Containing the Tragedie

The other sources, from which the dramatist, or dramatists, took their material, were Hall's Chronicle, whether from the original or from Holinshed, and the Mirror for Magistrates. There are very few, if any, original incidents. or details introduced either by the authors of the two older plays or by Shakespeare.

The most important points of those in dispute are these two: First, had Shakespeare anything to do with The Contention and The True Tragedy, as they have come down to us in their published form? Secondly, did anyone assist Shakespeare in the adaptation of these plays as they appear in the First Folio under the title of the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI.? As to the first question, it greatly depends upon whether The Contention and True Tragedy have really come down to us in their original form, or whether they had been touched up by Shakespeare's or any other hand, before they were printed. this point we have no direct evidence of any kind, and very little indirect. As to the second question, we have nothing to rely upon but internal evidence; and what there is of that points most strongly to Marlowe, if to anyone, as Shakespeare's coadjutor. There are undoubtedly some of the added passages in these plays which strongly resemble Marlowe's style,' and which lead us to believe that either he assisted Shakespeare in the adaptation of the old plays, or, if not, that Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously, imitated the style of the older dramatist.

As to

1

The theory held by Johnson and Steevens, and adopted by Knight, Ulrici, Delius, &c., that Shakespeare wrote The Contention and The True Tragedy as well as the revised editions printed in F. 1, may be dismissed as untenable; and so may the singular contention of Mr. Fleay (see Macmillan's Magazine, Nov. 1875) that the whole of the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI. are by Peele and Marlowe; and that Shakespeare revised these plays, though he did not write them, about 1601 (see Stokes, p. 10). The most generally received

1 For one instance, see II. Henry VI. note 195.

opinion is, that Greene, and Marlowe, and, perhaps, Peele, wrote the two older plays, and that Shakespeare altered them into the form in which they have come down to us in F. 1. By far the best account of the whole of the history of these plays, and of the controversy concerning their authorship, will be found in a most admirable paper by Miss Jane Lee (New Shak. Soc. Transactions, 1875-6, part 2, pp. 217-219). Miss Lee comes to the conclusin that The Contention and The True Tragedy were by Marlowe and Greene, and that possibly Peele had some share in them; that they are not imperfect representations of the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI.; that Shakespeare had nothing to do with the older plays, and that he was probably helped by Marlowe in altering them into the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI. She gives several resemblances of verbal expression and of thought, in both The Contention and The True Tragedy, to the acknowledged works of Marlowe and of Greene; and several allusions from both dramatists, especially from Marlowe's Edward II., which are either repeated or imitated in The Contention and The True Tragedy.

As to the external evidence which tells against Shakespeare having had anything to do with the two older plays, it may be noted that Miss Lee insists very strongly on what Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps pointed out in his Introduction to the republication of The Contention and The True Tragedy (see Hazlitt, pp. 388, 389), namely, that Millington did not put Shakespeare's name to either of these plays, not even in the edition published as late as 1600; that after the year 1598, none of the undisputed plays of Shakespeare, except the early edition of Romeo and Juliet, and the first edition of Hamlet (Q. 1, 1603), were published without his name on the title-page; that it was not till 1619, or three years after Shakespeare's death, that the Two Parts were published together by Pavier, to whom the copyright had been transferred, with Shakespeare's name on the titlepage. This gentleman appears to have done a great business in spurious Shakespearean plays, but not during the poet's lifetime. After his death he published Sir John Oldcastle, The

Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Puritan; stating that they were written by William Shakespeare, though we know that he had nothing on earth to do with any of them. The omission by Meres, writing in 1598, of any mention either of any of the Three Parts of Henry VI. or of The Contention and The True Tragedy among the list of Shakespeare's plays, although he gives Titus Andronicus, is a strong negative argument against the theory that Shakespeare was part author of the older plays.

Of contemporary allusions to the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI., the most important is the well-known passage from Greene's Groats-worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentaunce: "for there is an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players 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 onely Shake-scene in a countrie" (Shakspere Allusion Books, Series iv. No. 1, p. 30).

This passage seems to prove, first, that Greene had a share in the two earlier plays; secondly, that Shakespeare was the person who afterwards adapted them, and perhaps more or less adopted them as his own, in the shape of the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI.

In the Epilogue to Henry V. (lines 9-14) there is a manifest allusion to all Three Parts of Henry VI. :

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: Which oft our stage hath shown; and, for their sake, In your fair minds, let this acceptance take.

This passage seems to prove beyond all doubt, that Shakespeare considered all Three Parts of Henry VI. as at least partly his own. Line 11 seems to refer especially to I. Henry VI.; line 12 to II. Henry VI.; while line 13 seems to imply that more than one play was alluded to. Still it is, perhaps, but fair to admit that the reference may be only to the First Part of Henry VI.; and that "their sake" might be nothing but a careless use of

the plural possessive, or might refer to the characters in the play.

The question as to whether Shakespeare had any hand in The Contention and The True Tragedy, as they have come down to us, is one very difficult to determine. On the one hand, there are many passages in the two older plays -one may almost say whole scenes which, as far as we can judge from internal evidence, after making every allowance for the crudity of Shakespeare's style when first writing for the stage, we cannot bring ourselves to believe were written by him. On the other hand, there are speeches and scenes of such merit, many of which we find to have undergone little or no alteration in the revised versions, that we feel tempted to claim them for Shakespeare. But what is more important than the mere language of the plays, the characterization, in two important instances-those of Queen Margaret and Richard, Duke of Gloucester is nearly as complete in the older plays as it is in the revised versions. If we hold that The Contention and The True Tragedy were the works of two or more joint authors, not including Shakespeare, it would be unjust to attribute to these joint authors the demerits of the two older plays, and not to credit them with the merits such as they are. It must, in fairness, be granted that whoever wrote the soliloquy of Gloucester in The True Tragedy, to him belongs the credit of the original conception of the Richard who is the hero of Richard III. True it is that Shakespeare, in the latter play, may have very much elaborated the character, but all the main features of the intellectual and unscrupulous egotist, who makes love to Lady Anne over the coffin of her late husband, are to be found in the Gloucester who speaks these remarkable lines (III. Henry VI. v. 6. 81-83):

And this word "love," which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another,
And not in me: I am myself alone

(identically the same as in The True Tragedy, p. 102); while the fascinating hypocrisy, if one may use such an expression, of the murderer of the young princes is epitomized in that line (III. Henry VI. iii. 2. 182):

Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,

nearly word for word the same as in The True Tragedy (p. 64):

Tut I can smile, and murder when I smile. Also with regard to Queen Margaret; however much her speeches may be improved in the revised editions, and however easily we may trace the touches of Shakespeare's poetic fancy in many scenes in which she figuresin that, for instance, between her and Suffolk in the Second Part-still we must admit that the resolute and purposeful woman, who struggles so boldly against every difficulty almost with success, even against the greatest difficulty of all, the paralyzing influence of her too gentle and too conscientious husband, exists in the Margaret of The Contention and The True Tragedy; and that the development of her character in Richard III. is but a development and not a creation. No one can read carefully The Contention and The True Tragedy without perceiving that there are passages where all sense, and rhythm, and metre seem wanting; passages the language of which is of the baldest description. On the other hand, there are also passages evidently written by one who was a master of blank verse, as far as its capacities were then developed; by one who had no little sense of dramatic effect as well as poetic fancy and vigour. It is also clear, when we compare the revised versions as printed in the Folio with the older plays, that the former are something more than a mere correction of transcribers' or printers' errors, an amplification of scenes or of individual speeches: they are, evidently, the result of a careful revision and partial rewriting by one who was at once a poet and a practical dramatist. It is therefore a perfectly fair and reasonable theory to suppose that the two plays were, originally, the work of other authors than Shakespeare; while to him belongs the merit of the additions and the improvements found in the revised edition. But it is scarcely fair or reasonable to say that every passage in the older plays, which is of sufficient merit to have been Shakespeare's, and which we cannot assign to any one of his contemporaries, was therefore written by him; but that for faults in those plays he is in no way responsible. What is

more just and reasonable, and probably nearer the truth, is that Shakespeare did assist the authors of the older plays; but that he was at the time an unknown man, and quite unpractised in his art. He therefore did not carry so much influence with him as did his older and more experienced collaborators, who might fairly expect to receive the far larger share, if not the whole, of the credit attached to the work. But, as Shakespeare advanced in the estimation not only of those connected with the theatres but also of the public, the rumour would get about that he was, at least, part author of The Contention and The True Tragedy; and perhaps rather more than his due share of the merit of these plays would have been assigned to him. This could not but have irritated Greene and his other coadjutors; and the well-known passage in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, already quoted, was the result. Afterwards, when Shakespeare had established his position in the theatre, he would very naturally take up again The Contention and The True Tragedy; and, having conceived the idea of writing a play on the subject of Richard III.. would revise them with as much care as his inclination or his other occupations allowed.

STAGE HISTORY.

There does not appear to be any record of the performance either of The Contention or The True Tragedy, in their unadapted shapes. We only know from the title-page of the first edition of The True Tragedy that it had been acted by the Earl of Pembroke's servants sundry times before 1595. On none of the titlepages of The Contention is any mention made of its having been performed. It will be observed that both Q. 1 and Q. 2 of The True Tragedy have on them "The True Tragedy," &c., "with the whole contention between the Houses of Lancaster and York," although they only contain the Second Part properly speaking; the third edition of 1619 is also called The Whole Contention, and does include both parts. We may therefore infer that the First Part, usually called The Contention, was acted as well as The True Tragedy, which forms its sequel. It is not very probable that the play

mentioned by Henslowe (see Introduction to I. Henry VI.) contained any portion of The Contention or of The True Tragedy; and there is no mention of the performance of either the Second or Third Parts of Henry VI. As to the two plays, after they had been altered by Shakespeare and their titles changed, there is no mention of them in Henslowe, Downes, or Pepys. The only contemporary reference-and that not an over complimentary one-to the performance of these two plays is to be found in the Prologue to Ben Jonson's Every Man In His Humour:

Though need make many poets, and some such
As art and nature have not better'd much;
Yet ours for want hath not so lov'd the stage,
As he dare serve the ill customs of the age,
Or purchase your delight at such a rate,
As, for it, he himself must justly hate:
To make a child now swaddled, to proceed
Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed,
Past threescore years; or, with three rusty swords,
And help of some few foot and half-foot words,
Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars,
And in the tyring-house bring wounds to scars.
-Works, vol. i. p. 4.

This Prologue will have to be again alluded to with reference to the plays of Henry V. and Winter's Tale. Gifford says that it was probably written in 1596, but does not appear to have been given to the press till 1616; and he maintains that the references are not to Shakespeare's plays, but to others; and that the reference to York and Lancaster's long jars is to the old chronicle plays, that is to say, I suppose, to The Contention and The True Tragedy, and not to Shakespeare's adaptations of those plays. It is quite possible that Gifford may be right. At the same time, if Jonson did refer to Shakespeare's plays, there is nothing very malicious in such a reference. It is quite possible that the two poets might still be very good friends, and yet thoroughly appreciate the very distinct qualities of each other. In fact, as Shakespeare himself, in his own Prologue to Henry V. (spoken by the Chorus), ridicules the scantiness of the devices by which battles were represented on the stage, he would, probably, have not regarded it as anything malignant in the older poet, who represented what we might call the ultra