already quoted must be a first draft. These are the lines: "Why died he not in his bed? What would you have me to do then? Can I make men live whether they will or no? Sirra, go fetch me the strong poison which the Pothicary sent me. Oh, see where Duke Humphrey's ghost doth stand, And stares me in the face. Look, look, comb down his hair, So now he's gone again. Oh! oh! oh!" I have italicized the words that occur in the complete play, as in my unpublished edition of the parallel texts of these plays I have done for every word in them, and I confidently ask the reader if there is anything in the words not italicized that shows any art superior to a makeshift version of a short-hand note-taker at the theatre. But more than this: We know that such versions in pirated editions are common. Here is one from the first edition of Hamlet, which play Dr. Abbott has investigated independently, and come to the conclusion that there is not a line in it beyond what is in the second quarto that he believes to be written by Shakespeare.1 "To be or not to be, I there's the point, To die to sleep, is that all? I all: Does any one think that this passage is a first draft of Hamlet's famous soliloquy? I fancy not. Then why must Beaufort's death-scene be a first draft? But then they change face and say: There are many passages that are really good, but which in the later text are replaced by better which are entirely different. Thus, near the end of 2 Hen. VI., in Clifford's speech, after a long piece that does not occur in the quarto, he says: "Henceforth I will not have to do with pity, Come, then, new ruin of old Clifford's house: As did Æneas old Anchises bear, So bear I thee upon my manly shoulders. But, then, Eneas found a living load, Nothing so heavy as these woes of mine." In The Contention this stands thus :"Sweet father to thy murthered ghost I swear Immortal hate unto the house of York, Nor shall I never sleep secure one night, Till I have furiously revenged thy death, And left not one of them to breathe on earth. [He takes him up on his back. And thus as old Anchises' son did bear His aged father on his manly back, And fought with him against the bloody Greeks! Even so will I. them But stay, here's one of To whom my soul hath sworn immortal hate." [Enter Richard, and then Clifford lays down his father, fights with him, and Richard flies away again. Did Greene, Marlow, or Peele, all of them true poets, two of them great poets, write this stuff? Is it not clearly an interpolation 2 of players who wanted to introduce a combat to please the groundlings? But we cannot examine more passages. In my unpublished texts of Hamlet and of these plays every passage is criticised in detail: if they ever appear, I am confident that my case will be proven, if indeed it is not so already. Come we then to The marks of piratical reproduction are: 1: Words chiefly exclamatory ('sdeath, for instance), introduced at the beginning of lines. 2. Omissions of words needful for the sense and metre. 3. Mangling of the sense by misarrangement of words. 4. Erroneous metrical division of the lines. 5. Filling up of lacunes by inferior matter. All of these occur in The Whole Contention. rhymes, stanzas (sometimes sonnets), and in all but the last-named many doggrel rhymes. Well, they will say, I what of that? These are tragedies, those are comedies. True, but Shakespeare according to them wrote Romeo and Juliet his first tragedy, and Richard II. his first history, in the same rhyming style as his comedies. If he wrote The Contention, or any part of it, he must have done so at the time when he wrote Richard III., to which they are closely allied in metre. But he certainly did not write Richard III. so early as the above-named plays. Therefore he did not write The Contention; which drives my opponents back to their last refuge, Malone's theory. If they say, well, you object to our hypothesis, according to your view you must produce evidence of your own kind; where are there any metrical peculiarities in Marlow, Greene, and Peele ? No one has yet seen any in their blank verse, and there is a clear presumption against Peele, because there are no such rhymes as royal, withál; agó, ráinbow, etc. then I interpose and say Haltez là, that is just my point. Thank you for your argument. In Peele there are many lines with an extra syllable in the middle of the verse; not like Shakespeare's, with a pause after it, as in— " Or I mistake | you. || O would | her name were The covering sky is nothing. || Bohe mia nothing," in which moreover the extra syllable is in Shakespeare a light one: but without a pause, and often a heavy syllable. Here are a few instances from Edward J. "Owen | apRice | while we stay | for fur | ther force, Victorious Ed ward to whom | the Scottish kings Lovely queen Elinor, un | to her turn thine eye Baliol❘ behold I give | thee the Scottish crown. Our solemn service of co | rona | tion past." These all occur in two pages, the first I open here are some from 2 Hen. "Duke Hum | frey has done a mi | racle | to-day. You make in a day my lord | whole towns to fly. Under the countenance and confe | děrăcie The second Will | iam of Hat | field and the third, And left behind him Rich | ǎrd his on | ly son Till Henry Bull | ingbrooke duke | of Lancaster." All from one page. Such lines do not occur in Greene or Marlow; and in Shakespeare only very rarely till the end of his career. Here then we have our quantitative test, and on applying it we find our results confirmed. There are lines of this kind in every verse scene in 2 Hen. VI., except the two great Marlow scenes already pointed out. In those two there are no such lines. In 3 Hen. VI. there are such lines in every scene in Act i., Act iii., Act iv. (except Scene 8, which should properly be joined to Act v.) Hence we may fairly conclude that in the other scenes Peele had no share. The peculiar rhyme also occurs at least in one instance at the end of Clifford's speech in 2 Hen. VI. Act iv. Scene 8"To France, to France, and get what you have lost, Spare England, for it is your native coast; Henry hath money, you are strong and manly, God on our side, doubt not of victory." With regard to the many minute points of metre which I have noted, the details which I have counted, &c., I will spare the reader; they would be out of place unless addressed to students of early literature. I need only say, that all the percentages agree with those I have gathered from a metrical investigation of Marlow, Greene, and Peele through all their works; and are given in full in the edition I have prepared of these plays. I must notice however the great abundance of rhyme in 1 Hen. VI., Act iv. 2-7, and v. 2. This is so remarkable as at first sight to seem to point to another author; but the same James IV., where nearly whole scenes are written in rhyme, while his Orlando and Friar Bacon have comparatively very few. His practice in this respect was clearly irregular. Mr. R. Simpson, the best authority we now have on the plays of this date, will perhaps give us a complete chronology of them which may explain Greene's change of metre. It remains to say somewhat as to style. Malone has given a list of classical allusions from 1 Hen. VI., which he regards as showing conclusively that that play was not written by Shakespeare; but he has curiously omitted to note that they occur abundantly not only in 2 Hen. VI. and 3 Hen. VI., but in the very parts of those plays which, not being in The Whole Contention, he regards as Shakespeare's additions. As this bears so strongly against all the theorists who hold that Shakespeare had any part in these dramas it will be worth while to give a few instances. "1. As did the fatal brand Althea burnt Unto the Prince's heart of Calydon." Compare with this Hen. IV. Act ii. Sc. 2, "Althæa's Dream": "2. To sit and watch me as Ascanius did, When he to madding Dido would unfold, His father's acts commenced in burning "3. And now like Ajax Telamonius, On sheep or oxen could I spend my fury. "4. As wild Medea young Absyrtus did. "5. Helen of Greece was fairer far than thou, Although thy husband may be Menelaus. "6. As victors wear at the Olympian games. 7. As Ulysses and stout Diomed, 66 With sleight and manhood stole to These are so unlike Shakespeare's writing that those who claim for him a hand in Hen. VI. are driven to assert that in his early work he imitated the style of his fellow-workers. If such a doctrine as this is admitted, we may as well give up criticism altogether. Not only did he in the earliest works we know to be his write in a perfectly distinct style of his own, but all through his career his work can confessedly be separated from others. From The Taming of and Pericles, from The Two Noble Kinsmen, it is quite clear that when he wrote with others he never altered his own style a jot, that whether he altered theirs is a moot question. Never was there a man who wrote in so many distinct styles, and in every one of them retained a perfect individuality. Fletcher and Massinger wrote individually enough, but always the same; as they began so they ended. Yet they never imitated any one, nor were ever suspected of doing so it was reserved for this age of criticism to maintain that England's greatest man was a purloiner of other men's plumes in a worse sense than poor Greene meant. There are abundance of other arguments from the use of Latin quotations and similes, the use of words certainly not Shakespearian in both The Whole Contention and the additions made thereto in Henry VI., the use of expres sions found also in Peele, Greene, or Marlow, and similar verbal matters; but these, though valuable to the student, make heavy reading, and at present I must only say that I have worked these completely out with greater labour than the result is worth, and that the verdict of all these tests unites in confirming our conclusions from what I have here laid before the reader, that Shakespeare had no hand in any part of Henry VI., except in the scene in the Temple Garden the next to it; no hand, that is, as a writer. He may have corrected Hen. VI.; certainly not have originally written any one scene of 2 Hen. VI. or 3 Hen. VI. Our investigations, then, bring us back to our starting-point; only instead of saying there is no evidence of Shakespeare's having written any part of The Whole Contention, we can now say there is evidence of the strongest kind against it. These plays were produced by companies unconnected with Shakespeare, published by a piratical house in the habit of putting his name to productions manifestly spurious. They consisted of surreptitious fragments taken down in short-hand at theatrical performances, hired to write additions, or by some strutting player, who interpolated bits of sensation for the groundlings. At the same time the genuine plays from which these were stolen, bear throughout in their diction, their power and weakness, their amount and kind of dramatic characterization, their style, their metre, their handling of the classics, palpable evidence of having been written by Peele and Marlow. The question still remains-How came they in the first folio? The answer is not hard to find. It is clear that somehow they had before 1623 got into the hands of the King's players the King's players (formerly the Chamberlain's); the play of 1 Hen. VI. belonged to the same company, and had been dovetailed to them by the addition of its last scene, which is neither Greene's nor Marlow's, like the greater part of the play; Shakespeare was known to have added to this history (Act ii. Sc. 4), and probably to have corrected it throughout. The editors then finding Shakespeare's name on the title-page of The Whole Contention, and having very possibly acquired their property in 2, 3 Hen. VI. after his death,1 concluded that these as well as 1 Hen. VI. were revised and altered by him, and issued them altogether as parts of one work. The persistency of recent critics in perpetuating their blunder is their best excuse. They may also be pardoned on account of their want of critical discrimination. I have already noticed their omission of Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Besides this it is clear that they began to print Troilus and Cressida for this edition, to follow Romeo and Juliet, and paged it accordingly, but afterwards changed their intention, and inserted in its place Timon of Athens, which did not nearly fill up the vacancy. Then they printed Troilus and Cressida, and inserted it unpaged, except at the beginning, between the histories and tragedies, even then not inserting its title in their 1 But if, as I think, they acquired them in 1600, Shakespeare may have corrected them; he certainly did not write or rewrite any part index. This indecision about a play so clearly Shakespeare's in its best parts is a strong confirmation of what I have previously advanced. And here it might seem our task ends. But there is a greater difficulty behind. There is such a similarity between parts of 2, 3, Hen. VI. and Richard III. as distinctly to show a unity of authorship. Phrases not occurring elsewhere in Shakespeare are frequently repeated in these plays, and there is a continuity in the plot, and in the character of Richard especially, that is unmistakable. I cannot here treat of the play of Richard III., but I may indicate the outlines of my theory. No one can read the play without feeling that the true Shakespeare is not fully shown till we come to the battle; the last three scenes, and those only, show Shakespeare's free handling; and there are through the play many touches of his. But the following points must be well weighed before my argument is touched by that, apparently, strong objection. 1. Richard III. is entirely free from the classical allusions and Latin quotations so frequent in Henry VI. both in the parts common to The Whole Contention and the parts peculiar to itself. This alone is sufficient to indicate an author or authors different from the main plotter of 2, 3, Hen. VI. 2. There is strong reason to believe (the evidence turns on many small points too numerous to give here) that Marlow revised The Whole Contention, just as Shakespeare did 1 Hen. VI. and added even in Peele's part of the work. I hope to give evidence of this in a future paper. 3. The similar parts in Richard III. and 2, 3, Hen. VI. occur entirely in the parts that contain Peele's peculiar form of line, never in the other parts. 4. That in the different readings so abundant in this play, which mark a different origin for the quarto and folio, and have given all editors so much trouble, but have as yet never received any satisfactory explanation, there is James IV., where nearly whole scenes are written in rhyme, while his Orlando and Friar Bacon have comparatively very few. His practice in this respect was clearly irregular. Mr. R. Simpson, the best authority we now have on the plays of this date, will perhaps give us a complete chronology of them which may explain Greene's change of metre. It remains to say somewhat as to style. Malone has given a list of classical allusions from 1 Hen. VI., which he regards as showing conclusively that that play was not written by Shakespeare; but he has curiously omitted to note that they occur abundantly not only in 2 Hen. VI. and 3 Hen. VI., but in the very parts of those plays which, not being in The Whole Contention, he regards as Shakespeare's additions. As this bears so strongly against all the theorists who hold that Shakespeare had any part in these dramas it will be worth while to give a few instances. "1. As did the fatal brand Althea burnt Unto the Prince's heart of Calydon." Compare with this Hen. IV. Act ii. Sc. 2, "Althæa's Dream" : "2. To sit and watch me as Ascanius did, When he to madding Dido would unfold, His father's acts commenced in burning "3. And now like Ajax Telamonius, On sheep or oxen could I spend my fury. "4. As wild Medea young Absyrtus did. "5. Helen of Greece was fairer far than thou, Although thy husband may be Menelaus. "6. As victors wear at the Olympian games. "7. As Ulysses and stout Diomed, With sleight and manhood stole to These are so unlike Shakespeare's writing that those who claim for him a hand in Hen. VI. are driven to assert that in his early work he imitated the style of his fellow-workers. If such a doctrine as this is admitted, we may as well give up criticism altogether. Not only did he in the earliest works we know to be his write in a perfectly distinct style of his own, but all through his career his work can confessedly be separated from others. From The Taming of and Pericles, from The Two Noble Kinsmen, it is quite clear that when he wrote with others he never altered his own style a jot, that whether he altered theirs is a moot question. Never was there a man who wrote in so many distinct styles, and in every one of them retained a perfect individuality. Fletcher and Massinger wrote individually enough, but always the same; as they began so they ended. Yet they never imitated any one, nor were ever suspected of doing so: it was reserved for this age of criticism to maintain that England's greatest man was a purloiner of other men's plumes in a worse sense than poor Greene meant. There are abundance of other arguments from the use of Latin quotations and similes, the use of words certainly not Shakespearian in both The Whole Contention and the additions made thereto in Henry VI., the use of expressions found also in Peele, Greene, or Marlow, and similar verbal matters; but these, though valuable to the student, make heavy reading, and at present I must only say that I have worked these completely out with greater labour than the result is worth, and that the verdict of all these tests unites in confirming our conclusions from what I have here laid before the reader, that Shakespeare had no hand in any part of Henry VI., except in the scene in the Temple Garden the next to it; no hand, that is, as a writer. He may have corrected Hen. VI.; certainly not have originally written any one scene of 2 Hen. VI. or 3 Hen. VI. Our investigations, then, bring us back to our starting-point; only instead of saying there is no evidence of Shakespeare's having written any part of The Whole Contention, we can now say there is evidence of the strongest kind against it. These plays were produced by companies unconnected with Shakespeare, published by a piratical house in the habit of putting his name to productions manifestly spurious. They consisted of surreptitious fragments taken down in short-hand at theatrical performances, |