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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:

'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

scene echoes the close of 1 Tamburlaine, Act III; and the burial of Zenocrate is again clearly parodied in the burial of Salisbury (II. ii).1

All this means mimicry, conscious or unconscious. Frequently the imitation degenerates into travesty, as in the weak mouthing of Bedford (I. i. 148-156) and the atrocious rot of the whole scene in which Salisbury is stricken (I. iv). Imagine Marlowe making his chief hero say at the height of passion: 'What chance is this, that suddenly hath cross'd us? Speak, Salisbury; at least, if thou canst speak,' etc.

It is easier to conceive the mighty line to have attained the unsurpassable flatness of the messenger's words in II. iii. 29,

30:

'Stay, my Lord Talbot; for my Lady craves
To know the cause of your abrupt departure.'

The real proof that Marlowe did not write Harry the Sixth is the absence of any passion except in scenes which bear marks of revision. The lines are usually musical and sometimes charming, and the stage action is interesting, but they are not irradiated by the electric intensity that scintillates in Marlowe. Till Shakespeare vivifies him in the fourth act, Talbot himself is but a skeleton in armor.

2. Greene?

Greene has been very often suggested as the author of this play, most recently by Gray, though with reservations, and most positively by Hart. I see nothing that renders such an attribution reasonable: Hart's verbal parallels seem quite without demonstrative value. Greene's essays in the chronicle his

1 Several of these similarities have been noted by Anders, Shakespeare's Books, p. 121. Sarrazin had previously mentioned the resemblance of Joan's appeal to Burgundy (III. iii) and Tamburlaine's appeal to Theridamas (305 ff.).

tory drama are notably characteristic, and evidence a method entirely unlike that of this play. He nowhere exhibits any tendency toward patriotic themes or any interest in the facts of history. Rather in his quasi-historic plays, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and James IV (and in George-a-Greene if it be his), he yields to an apparently irresistible devotion for pastoral woodland settings, romantic love stories, quaint supernaturalism, and clownish roguery. Unless one can fancy Joan's brief address to her fiends (V. iii. 1-24) to be akin in atmosphere or purpose to the magic humbuggery of Bacon and the fairy machinery of Oberon, 1 Henry VI is wholly unlike Greene in all these points. It is unlike him both in the inflexibility with which it harps on the historical note, and in its absence of humor, sentiment, or pathos. Greene, of course, may have written the play, but it is less like his avowed work than that of any contemporary dramatist.

3. Peele ?

It is not by a process of elimination merely that I arrive at George Peele as the most likely author of the old Harry the Sixth play. Indications of several kinds point in Peele's direction. He was at the time the work was produced distinctly the most conspicuous exponent of jingoistic national pride—a trait of which Marlowe shows absolutely nothing and Greene hardly more. Peele had composed the patriotic masques to celebrate the Lord Mayoralty of Sir Wolstan Dixie in 1585 and of Sir William Web in 1591. His Polyhymnia (1590) lauded in martial strains 'the honourable Triumph at Tilt' when Sir Henry Lea formally resigned his post of Queen's Champion, and he again touched the same theme in Anglorum Feriae (1595), written in honor of the thirty-seventh anniversary of Elizabeth's accession.

In 1589 he had twice come forth as the spokesman of the nation: in his Eclogue Gratulatory to the Earl of Essex 'for his welcome into England from Portugal,' and in his fine Farewell, ‘Entituled to the famous and fortunate Generals of our English forces: Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake.' Later, again, in 1593, he linked the knighthood of his age with that of the past in The Honour of the Garter.1 His plays of the same period, Edward I and The Battle of Alcazar, arė equally filled with the praise of English daring. No known author of 1591 has anything like the same claim on merely extrinsic evidence to be regarded as the author of a play in celebration of the martial exploits of the brave Lord Talbot.2

General similarities between Peele's Edward I and 1 Henry VI have been often noted, particularly the unhappy resemblance in the defamation of the Spanish Eleanor and the French Joan of Arc. One of the most insular of Britons, Peele was incapable of glorifying his countrymen without slandering the races they opposed. The undramatic line put into Joan's mouth (III. iii. 85),

'Done like a Frenchman: turn, and turn again!'

is fairly characteristic of his bigotry.

The verse of the older portions of the playsaccharine rather than strong, and the loose but animated structure are what one finds in Peele's recognized dramas. The imitation of Marlowe is

1 This poem should be compared with Talbot's speech, 'When first this order was ordained,' etc. (IV. i. 33 ff.).

2 Peele's favorite epigram, which he affixes at least three times to his poems, might well serve as motto for 1 Henry VI:

'Gallia victa dedit flores, invicta leones

Anglia, jus belli in flore, leone suum;

O sic, O semper ferat Anglia laeta (or 'Elizabetha') triumphos,

Inclyta Gallorum flore, leone suo.'

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