TUANSFER JAN 2 6 1942 INTRODUCTION. THE Second Part of King Henry VI. carries on the course of history from the marriage of Henry VI. with Margaret of Anjou, in the year 1445, to the victory of the Duke of York at the first battle of St. Albans, on the 23rd of May, 1455. It covers, therefore, a period of ten years, and its purpose is to tell a tale of the development of civil war to the first shock of arms, the beginning of bloodshed. In the long war that followed the first battle of St. Albans, at which this play ends, there were twelve pitched battles, with a slaughter of the greater part of the nobility of England, including eighty princes of the blood. The Second Part of King Henry VI., ascribed to Shakespeare, is simply a poet's transcript of the play published in 1594 as "The First Part of the Contention 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 Iacke Cade: And the Duke of Yorke's 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 Cornhill." Of this edition of 1594 there was a reprint in 1600, with some corrections and some errors of carelessness, including the omission of about two dozen words. Of each of these editions there is a copy in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. There is also in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, an incomplete copy of another edition of 1600, printed, like the two already named, for Thomas Millington, with a few trifling variations. There is reason to think that Robert Greene had a hand in the writing of these Civil War plays in their earliest form. Marlowe and others may have worked with him upon them. Anything said upon that head must include reference to the next following play; the convenient place, therefore, for a note upon this subject will be in the Introduction to the Third Part of King Henry VI. Whether the play known as the First Part of the Contention appears in its earliest form in the earliest edition known to us, that of 1594, admits also of question. It may be argued that it is a result of Shakespeare's first handling of an original now lost; and that he went over it a second time for fuller development into the play now known to us as the Second Part of King Henry VI. Argument to this effect has most weight when applied to passages in the next following play. The consideration of it is for that reason deferred. Allowance is to be made for the fact that the text of the old play in the quarto of 1594 may be corrupted in other ways than by occasional misprints of a word which we find rightly given in the Second Part of King Henry VI. We may have in the Second Part of King Henry VI. restorations also in some cases of a text which is not given in the quarto as it was first written, but is there mutilated by abridgment. Fair allowance may be made for all such side considerations, including the possibility—I do not say the probability that there may be something of Shakespeare in the old play of the First Part of the Contention. But to any one who closely compares that old play with the version of it ascribed to Shakespeare as his Second Part of King Henry VI., one fact, I think, must become apparent. With the old play before him Shakespeare copied it, revising as he went. He varied words, restored lost music to many lines, transposed passages, in every case with a distinct gain of dramatic power, and added lines of his own, sometimes long passages, where there are situations worth fuller poetical treatment than they had received. Some shorter additions are no doubt mere restorations of the old text when there are errors of omission in the quarto of 1594; but the new elaborations speak for and explain themselves. It is difficult to feel the current of poetical invention while we are turning critically from one play to another for comparison of texts. I have given, therefore, in this edition, the old play of the First Part of the Contention as it has come down to us, that it may be read as an independent work. In the printing of the Second Part of Henry VI. I have then underlined the passages which are not to be found in the old play after giving for a few pages such note of the variations of word and order as may be sufficient to point out their character. What further note the reader may desire to take he can at leisure make for himself, since the two plays are before him for comparison. But although a mass of minute verbal annotation would interfere with the right reading of the play as a dramatic poem, the underlining of the added passages may be found to give fresh interest to the reading of the play by silent indication of the touch of Shakespeare's hand. The process of revision will be shown in the same way by giving the full text of the old True Tragedy of Richard III., which is the Second Part of the Contention, and underlining Shakespeare's additions to it in the Third Part of Henry VI. Shakespeare was not the only dramatist in Eliza-beth's reign who could write vigorous lines of dramatic poetry. It does not at all follow that in an old play to which Shakespeare may have contributed, all the best lines were of his writing. It was not by the mere writing of good verses that Shakespeare grew to be the master-poet of the world; and when he revised these plays on the most desolating of our English civil wars, he had not reached the fulness of his power. He was simply helping to lay stress upon the miseries of civil war, at a time when many Englishmen began to dread that there might be civil war again, arising out of rival claims to the throne after the death of Queen Elizabeth. It was in 1595 that Samuel Daniel published “The First Fowre Books of the Civille Warres betweene the Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke;" it was in 1596 that Drayton began to describe in heroic verse "The Lamentable Civell Warres of Edward the Second and the Barrons." Thomas Lodge made also in those days a play upon the Civil Wars of Marius and Sylla; and Shakespeare afterwards maintained an undernote that expressed miseries of civil war throughout his plays of Richard II. and King Henry IV. The Second Part of King Henry VI. begins with the king aged twenty-three; Suffolk, who has made truce with France, raised to a Dukedom; and Margaret . of Anjou received as Queen in England-a marriage declared fatal to England by Humphrey Duke of Gloster, the king's uncle and Lord Protector. The Duke of York and his friends, the Earls of Salisbury and Warwick, join in strong condemnation of the marriage. The scene then goes on to show the bitter feuds among the English nobles. Cardinal Beaufort hates Humphrey Duke of Gloster. The Dukes of Buckingham and Somerset will join with Beaufort and with Suffolk against Gloster, but each is then shown to be moved by selfish ambition. The scene ends with the ambition of the Duke of York, who-when Henry is in the arms of his " dear-bought queen," and Humphrey with the peers be fallen at jars"-will "raise aloft the milk-white rose," 66 "And in my standard bear the arms of York, To grapple with the House of Lancaster; And, force perforce, I'll make him yield the crown Here is a clear and firm opening of the subject, and in the original construction of the play its aim, as warning of the ills of Civil War, was never, in any scene, lost sight of. 66 The second scene shows the loyalty and kindliness of the Duke of Gloster, and the weak ambition of his wife, for whose attainture Suffolk is practising in hope that her attainture will be Humphrey's fall." The third scene shows the Duke of Gloster's popularity; the relations between Suffolk and Queen Margaret; their league against the Protector; the pious weakness of the king; Court feuds and factions which attack both the Duke of Gloster and the Duke of York. In |