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;
But I will rule both her, the king, and realm,'

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.1 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, 1593— a 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.

written only by a real poet and a skilled dramatist. There were not many such at this period. Marlowe was one, but I concur warmly in Mr. Gray's opinion that 'Marlowe himself cannot be read into this drama.' Marlowe's influence, however, is unquestionably apparent in the older parts of the play. Note, for example, the following echoes:1

I. i. 2:

'Comets, importing change of times and states' Marlowe's Lucan 527:

'And comets that presage the fall of kingdoms.'

I. i. 3:

'Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky.' Tamburlaine 1922:

'Shaking her silver tresses in the air.'

I. i. 22:

'Like captives bound to a triumphant car.' Edward II 174:

'With captive kings at his triumphant car.' I. i. 36:

'Whom like a school-boy you may over-awe.' Edward II 1336 f.:

'As though your highness were a school-boy still, And must be awed and governed like a child.'

I. i. 46:

'Instead of gold we'll offer up our arms.' Jew of Malta 758 f.:

'Instead of gold,

We'll send thee bullets wrapped in smoke and fire.

I. i.149:

'I'll hale the Dauphin headlong from his throne.' Tamburlaine 4021:

'Haling him headlong to the lowest hell.'

I. vi. 11, 12:

'Why ring not out the bells throughout the town? Dauphin, command the citizens make bonfires.'

Tamburlaine 1335 f.:

'Ringing with joy their superstitious bells,

And making bonfires for my overthrow.'

1 The line numbers for Marlowe's works are those of the Oxford edition

III. ii. 40:

"That hardly we escap'd the pride of France.' Tamburlaine 140:

'Lest you subdue the pride of Christendom.' Tamburlaine 3568:

To overdare the pride of Græcia.'

Dido 482:

"That after burnt the pride of Asia.'

III. ii. 136:

'But kings and mightiest potentates must die.' Tamburlaine 4641:

'For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die.'

III. iii. 13:

ટ

'And we will make thee famous through the world.' Tamburlaine 2173:

‘And makes my deeds infamous through the world.' III. iii. 24:

'But be extirped from our provinces.'

Faustus 122:

'And reign sole king of all our provinces.'

IV. vii. 32:

'Now my old arms are young John Talbot's grave. Jew of Malta 1192:

"These arms of mine shall be thy sepulchre.'

V. iv. 34:

Take her away; for she hath liv'd too long.' Edward II 2651:

'Nay, to my death, for too long have I lived.' V. iv. 87, 88:

'May never glorious sun reflex his beams Upon the country where you make abode.' Tamburlaine 969 f.:

'For neither rain can fall upon the earth, Nor sun reflex his virtuous beams thereon.'

Marlowe's general influence is also traceable, as in I. vi, where the barbaric magnificence of the Dauphin's promises to Joan plagiarizes those of Tamburlaine to Zenocrate (Tamb. 278 ff.), and his promise that Joan's coffin shall be carried before the kings and queens of France recalls the second part of Marlowe's play (II. iii, III. ii). The concluding couplet of this same