Experiment in Prosody (Gainesville, Fla: University of Florida Press, 1960), hereafter ...... the Arbury plays attribute
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WHEN harey MET SHAKESPEARE The Genesis of The First Part of Henry the Sixth
by
Paul J. Vincent
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English
The University of Auckland 2005
ABSTRACT
This thesis investigates the complex genesis of the play printed in the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623 as The first Part of Henry the Sixt. The Introduction identifies the tendency of previous scholars to minimise uncertainty in their chronological and authorship hypotheses for the play, and anchors the present study in the wider context of authorship theory and attribution studies. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the external and internal evidence for the play’s date, and deliberately avoid any speculation on its authorship in order to present the chronological evidence as objectively as possible. I demonstrate in Chapter 2 that it is only by carrying out a full structural analysis of the play that we can hope to disentangle and accurately appraise the various revision theories put forward by scholars over the centuries. Chapter 3 attempts, by means of a preliminary bibliographical analysis of the Folio text, to reconstruct the nature of the manuscript copy set into type by the Folio compositors. In Chapter 4 I conduct the first comprehensive assessment of Gary Taylor’s groundbreaking 1995 authorship hypothesis for the play and modify it significantly. The degree to which we are able to identify ‘who wrote what’ in the play is the concern of Chapter 5, where I conclude that The first Part of Henry the Sixt is Shakespeare’s revision of the play that appears in Philip Henslowe’s Diary as ‘harey the vj’; a play written by Thomas Nashe (Act 1) and an anonymous playwright (Acts 2–5) for Lord Strange’s company and first performed at the Rose theatre on 3 March 1592.
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For Mac Jackson
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis could not have been written without the practical and moral support of my principal supervisor Emeritus Professor MacDonald P. Jackson, and my parents June and Ivan Vincent. Valuable contributions have been made by my secondary supervisor University Distinguished Professor Brian Boyd. To Dr. Richard Millington go special thanks for his hawk-eyed proof-reading and sage suggestions. This thesis has benefited from the help and encouragement offered by Amy Mansfield, Brendon ‘Dadsy’ Russell, Rose Hoare, Angela Pearse, and Shireen Hawkins. Important financial assistance has been provided by The University of Auckland. I am ultimately indebted to Professor Gary Taylor for the existence of this thesis—in a field full of haystacks he showed me which one contained the needle.
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CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………….iv LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………………………...vii REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS…………………………………………...viii INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….1 0.1 The Death of the Author Robert Greene and the Birth of Shakespeare Criticism…3 0.2 Re-integrating 'Disintegration'……………………………………………………13 0.3 The Validity of the Author and Authorship Studies…………………………….. 19 1 BEGINNING TO DATE 1 HENRY VI……………………………………………...22 1.1 Riddling Henslowe's 'ne'………………………………………………………….26 1.2 Did Nashe's Talbot Star in Henslowe's harey the vj?…………………………….34 1.3 An Up-To-The-Minute History Play……………………………………………..40 1.4 2, 3, 1 Henry VI?………………………………………………………………… 44 1.5 The Testimony of the Texts………………………………………………………55 1.6 Taylor's Evidence…………………………………………………………………69 1.7 Thirty Years of Uncertainty………………………………………………………72 2 FOUR-PART HARMONY: THE REVISED harey the vj OF FLEAY, GAW, DOVER WILSON, AND MINCOFF………………………………………………80 2.1 The Industrious Fleay: a 'dogmatic pioneer'……………………………………...82 2.2 A Swift Eclipse: Gaw's Origin and Development………………………………..87 2.3 The General Structure of 1 Henry VI……………………………………………. 89 2.4 One Ending or Two?……………………………………………………………...92 2.5 Act 1 vs. Acts 2–5……………………………………………………………….100 2.6 The Restoration of Plantagenet 'to his blood' (2.4–3.1)…………………………110 2.7 Dover Wilson's Revising Shakespeare…………………………………………..118 2.8 Taylor in Two Minds: Revising Reignier……………………………………….121 2.9 The Bordeaux Sequence (4.2–7): The Talbots………………………………….123 2.10 The Bordeaux Sequence: The Three Introductory Scenes…………………….130 2.11 The Bordeaux Sequence: Sir William Lucy…………………………………...132 2.12 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..138
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3 RECONSTRUCTING THE COPY FOR 1 HENRY VI…………………………..141 3.1 Foul or Fair Copy?………………………………………………………………143 3.2 The Folio Act and Scene Divisions……………………………………………..154 4 AND THEN THERE WERE THREE: CRITIQUING TAYLOR'S DIVISIONS OF SHARES……………………………………………………………………….163 4.1 Taylor's Two Divisions…………………………………………………………165 4.2 Name Calling in 1 Henry VI……………………………………………………167 4.3 '[A] humble but frequent interjection': 'O' and 'Oh'…………………………….173 4.4 The Folio Scene Divisions Revisited…………………………………………...176 4.5 From 'Here' to…:The Linguistic Peculiarity of 1 Henry VI……………………180 4.6 Stylistic Fingerprints……………………………………………………………188 4.6.1 Compound Adjectives……………………………………………………………188 4.6.2 Classical Allusions……………………………………………………………….191 4.6.3 Biblical Allusions………………………………………………………………..204 4.6.4 Grammatical Inversion…………………………………………………………..208
4.7 The Prosody of 1 Henry VI…………………………………………………….218 4.8 Making Alterations to Taylor's Pattern………………………………………...228 4.9 Revisiting Dover Wilson's Authorship Hypothesis: Prosodic Profiles………...234 4.10 Scenic Parallels: Evidence of Common Authorship………………………….240 4.11 Four Talbots and Two Lucys: Two Hands in the Bordeaux Sequence……… 244 4.12 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………… 254 5 SHAKESPEARE, NASHE, AND ONE OTHER…………………………………257 5.1 Casting for 'Z', the Author of Act 1…………………………………………….259 5.2 The Grammatical Inversion of 'Z' and Nashe…………………………………..265 5.3 Between 'Traditional' and 'Non-Traditional' Attribution Techniques…………..270 5.4 The New Technique and Nashe……………………………………………… . 285 5.5 Who 'Y' Was Not……………………………………………………………….290 5.6 The Author of Acts 2–5 of harey the vj………………………………………...292 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………..301 APPENDIX: Literature Online DATA……………………………………………….303 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………..325
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LIST OF TABLES
1. Hinman’s identification of compositorial stints in the Folio 1 Henry VI…………….153 2. Act and scene divisions in the Folio, traditional editions, and the Oxford Complete Works (1986)………………………………………………………………………156 3. Distribution of the spellings ‘O’ and ‘Oh’ in the Folio 1 Henry VI (Taylor)……....174 4. Distribution of round brackets in the Folio 1 Henry VI (Taylor)…………………..179 5. Distribution of ‘Ye’ and ‘You’ in the Folio 1 Henry VI (Taylor)………………….183 6. Distribution of classical allusions in 1 Henry VI………………………………….. 203 7. Distribution of biblical allusions in 1 Henry VI……………………………………207 8. Distribution of grammatical inversion in 1 Henry VI………………………………216 9. Taylor’s analysis of feminine endings in 1 Henry VI, adjusted to Hattaway’s division……………………………………………………………………………...221 10. Oras’s verse pause patterns in 1 Henry VI keyed to the traditional division……….224 11. Distribution of split verse lines in 1 Henry VI……………………………………..226 12. Authorial division of 1 Henry VI: Shakespeare’s revision of Henslowe’s harey the vj, a collaborative play by Y and Z……………………………………………………256 13. Summary of Literature Online hits for Shakespeare in scenes of 1 Henry VI……..281 14. Summary of Literature Online hits for Nashe in scenes of 1 Henry VI……………287 15. Summary of Literature Online hits for Greene, Marlowe, and Peele in Y’s scenes of 1 Henry VI………………………………………………………………………….291
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REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS
The first time the title of a book or journal article is cited in this thesis the work is cited in full in the footnotes and subsequently cited in short form, for example ‘Taylor 1995’. The following abbreviations are used: BSANZ Bulletin
Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin
CHum
Computers and the Humanities
CUP
Cambridge University Press
ES
English Studies
LLC
Literary and Linguistic Computing
NQ
Notes and Queries
OED
Oxford English Dictionary
OUP
Oxford University Press
PBSA
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
PMLA
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
PQ
Philological Quarterly
RES
Review of English Studies
SB
Studies in Bibliography
SQ
Shakespeare Quarterly
SSu
Shakespeare Survey
UP
University Press
Literature Online is the Chadwyck-Healy electronic database .
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INTRODUCTION
To commemorate the quatercentenary of Christopher Marlowe’s death in 1993, Anthony Burgess published an evocative reconstruction of Marlowe’s double life as playwright and spy in the form of the novel A Dead Man in Deptford. 1 Late in the novel Marlowe is called away to Scotland on ‘Service’ business, leaving behind ‘an aspiring playman’ with whom he had been writing ‘The Contention Between the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster’, a play with ‘a most incommodious title which later would be changed to Henry VI Part One.’ 2 The narrator reports that the work was completed ‘with a kind of speed of insolence’ by one ‘Will of Warwickshire’. In the Author’s Note, Burgess makes ‘a certain claim to secondary scholarship’— he completed a thesis on Marlowe for his B.A. in 1940—and he assures his readers that all of the historical facts in the novel are verifiable. 3 One of the few things that all scholars of early Shakespeare agree on, however, is that the play printed in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare as The first Part of Henry the Sixt, hereafter referred to as ‘1 Henry VI’, was never called ‘The Contention Between the Two Houses of York and Lancaster’, and with this confusion Burgess provides proof of his own assertion that ‘the virtue of the historical novel is its vice – the flatfooted affirmation of possibility as fact’. One would obviously not expect to encounter this ‘virtuous vice’ of historical fiction in the scholarly criticism on 1 Henry VI, but it permeates the studies devoted to its genesis. There is one
1
Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford (London: Hutchinson, 1993). Hereafter cited as ‘Burgess 1993’. Ibid. p. 208. 3 Ibid. p. 271. 2
1
main reason for this: the extreme paucity of verifiable facts. The external evidence for the date of the play’s composition consists merely of the entries in the theatrical entrepreneur Phillip Henslowe’s Diary which record the performances of a play he calls ‘harey the vj’, beginning on 3 March 1592, and Thomas Nashe’s description in his Pierce Pennilesse (entered in the Stationers’ Register on 8 August of the same year) of a play in which Lord Talbot, a hero of the Hundred Years War, and ‘the terror of the French’, triumphs and dies again, just as he does in 1 Henry VI. As the earliest official record of Shakespeare’s involvement in the London theatrical community dates from the beginning of 1595, these two pieces of evidence, like the two Talbots at Bordeaux, have been beset on all sides, and hopelessly outnumbered by critics’ assumptions and conjectures. 4 Without historical facts, historical fictions have proliferated. By the end of 1592, the year in which most— but certainly not all—critics consider 1 Henry VI to have been written, Shakespeare is said to have written or partly written between five (according to the Oxford chronology) and eleven (according to E. A. J. Honigmann’s ‘early start’ chronology) plays. 5 With regard to the genesis of 1 Henry VI, critics have generally minimalised uncertainty in their hypotheses which have, to a greater or lesser extent, confused fact and supposition. From Edmond Malone in 1787, who stated that ‘we have undoubted proofs that Shakespeare was not above working on the materials of other men’, to Gary Taylor in 1995, who announces that 1 Henry VI ‘is the only securely dated play in the early
4
In William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), E. K. Chambers writes ‘…Shakespeare comes before us on 15 March 1595 with an assured theatrical status as a payee on behalf of the Chamberlain’s men for plays given at court in the winter of 1594, and therefore doubtless a sharer in the company’ (i, 62–3). This work is hereafter cited as ‘Chambers 1930’. 5 Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (with John Jowett and William Montgomery), William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 109–15, hereafter cited as ‘TC’; E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare’s Impact on his Contemporaries (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 88, hereafter cited as ‘Honigmann 1982’.
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Shakespeare canon—or rather, that II.iv and IV.ii–IV.vii.32 of [1 Henry VI] are the most securely dated passages of early Shakespearean dramatic verse’, the distinction between supposition and fact has been repeatedly blurred by the rhetoric of objectivity. 6 In the copious criticism on 1 Henry VI one seldom encounters an awareness of the fact that the objectivity of scholarly discovery comes more from the inter-subjectivity of critics, the interaction of different perspectives, evidence and arguments, than from the critics themselves managing to be individually objective. The four critics who have treated the genesis of 1 Henry VI most exhaustively are Allison Gaw, John Dover Wilson, Marco Mincoff, and Gary Taylor. They have drawn radically opposed conclusions and their agreement on even minor details is the exception rather than the rule. This thesis methodically scrutinises the solutions presented by these and the play’s lesser critics for the twin problems of who wrote it and when. In the circumstances, a convincing hypothesis for the genesis of 1 Henry VI has to acknowledge our fundamental uncertainty rather than seek to eliminate it. My close analysis of the surviving external evidence and that preserved in the Folio text itself moves from the possible to the most probable answers to the problems of the play’s date and authorship; at no stage does it claim to provide the answer.
0.1 The Death of the Author Robert Greene and the Birth of Shakespeare Criticism
6 Edmond Malone, Dissertation on the Three Parts of ‘King Henry VI’, tending to shew that those plays were not originally written by Shakespeare (1787) in Malone (ed.), The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (1790), 10 vols., vi, 383–429, at p. 398, hereafter cited as ‘Malone 1787’; Gary Taylor, ‘Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part One’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 7 (1995), 145–205, at p. 184. Hereafter cited as ‘Taylor 1995’.
3
In A Dead Man in Deptford Burgess deliberately keeps Shakespeare on the fringes of his novel about the life and death of Marlowe. The narrator is all too conscious that ‘[Shakespeare’s] is another story and its nudging and shouldering into this of Kit’s harms wholeness and bids break the frame’. 7 In this way, what is generally considered to be one of the greatest rivalries in the history of English drama stays out of the spotlight. But Burgess could not pass up the opportunity to depict the rivalry between the now all-butforgotten playwright Robert Greene and Shakespeare, a rivalry which, unlike that between Marlowe and Shakespeare, there is extant evidence for. 8 It is with this rivalry, or rather the description of it in the pamphlet entitled Greene’s Groatsworth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance (Stationers’ Register 20 September 1592), that a study investigating the genesis of 1 Henry VI most profitably begins. The Groatsworth claims to be the swan song of Greene, which would date its composition shortly before his death on 3 September 1592. It includes a letter to a trio of playwrights, usually thought to be Marlowe, George Peele and Nashe, warning them of the emergence of a young pretender:
Base minded men all three of you, if by my miserie you be not warnd: for unto none of you (like mee) sought those burres to cleave: those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange, that I, to whom they all have beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whome they all have beene beholding, shall (were yee in that case as I am now) bee both at once of them forsaken? Yes trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players
7 8
Burgess 1993, p. 213. Ibid. pp. 213–4.
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hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. O that I might intreat your rare wits to be imploied in more profitable courses: and let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions. 9
While most scholars, past and present, agree that the ‘upstart Crow’, the ‘onely Shakescene in a countrey’ is Shakespeare and all agree that ‘Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hyde’ is a distortion of the line appearing in 3 Henry VI as ‘O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide!’(I.iv.137), they are by no means unanimous on what the pamphlet is saying about him. 10 On the face of it, Greene’s authorship of the Groatsworth seems to be an open-andshut case; his name is there in the full title; a testimony that survived virtually unchallenged well into the twentieth century. There have, however, been a few dissenting critics, the most vocal of whom recently has been John Jowett. 11 If, as he contends, the author of the Groatsworth—specifically the author of the letter to the playwrights—was not in fact Greene but Henry Chettle, ‘who by his own account edited and transcribed Greene’s papers’, the earliest piece of Shakespeare ‘criticism’ was a forgery. If we cannot
9 Cited from D. Allen Carroll (ed.), Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit: Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592) (Binghampton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Text & Studies, 1994), pp. 83–5. Carroll argues convincingly (pp. 123– 9), that Nashe, and not Thomas Lodge, is the ‘yong Juvenall’ cited by the author of the Groatsworth at p. 82. 10 David Farley-Hills cautions scholars who associate Shakespeare too quickly and unreservedly with ‘Shake-scene’, in ‘Premature Foreclosure in the Henry VI Debate’, NQ, 242 (1997), 489–92, but provides no substantial evidence to support his contention that the allusion is not to Shakespeare but to Edward Alleyn. Farley-Hills himself forecloses prematurely on the authorship of the Groatsworth. 11 See his ‘Johannes Factotum: Henry Chettle and Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit’, PBSA, 87 (1993), 453–86. Hereafter cited as ‘Jowett 1993’.
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be sure who wrote the pamphlet that has been employed as the cornerstone of every hypothesis for the early Shakespeare canon and chronology since 1778, any ‘certainties’ established by critics concerning the genesis of 1 Henry VI have been built on an uncertain foundation. 12 Jowett begins his article with a critical evaluation of Warren B. Austin’s 1969 computer-aided study; a series of comparisons of word frequencies in the Greene and Chettle corpora which uncovers an array of statistical data in support of Chettle being the author of the Groatsworth. 13 Barring the discovery of new evidence, irrefutable proof is, of course, unobtainable but Austin’s work should establish in the minds of contemporary scholars that irrefutable proof of Greene’s authorship of the pamphlet is equally unobtainable. Jowett sees the need to ask ‘what further internal and contextual considerations might be adduced to clarify the nature of Chettle’s part in putting the pamphlet together’. 14 His process of clarification shows how the pamphlet’s jibe at Shakespeare (he is called a ‘Johannes fac totum’ or ‘Jack of All Trades’) is in fact a most apt epithet for Chettle himself. 15 In 1592 Chettle falsely signed his epistle to Anthony Munday’s Il Gerileon with Nashe’s initials, ‘T. N.’; a forgery which he confessed (while simultaneously blaming the printers) in his Kind-Heart’s Dream. 16 He was obliged to publish that work three months
12
Thomas Tyrwhitt discovered the ‘Shake-scene’ allusion and published it in the George Steevens–Samuel Johnson edition of Shakespeare in 1778. See below, p. 12. 13 Warren B. Austin, A Computer-Aided Technique of Stylistic Discrimination: The Authorship of ‘Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit’ (Washington D. C.: U.S. Office of Education, 1969). 14 Jowett 1993, pp. 454–5. 15 Jowett explains that Chettle’s association of at least five years with the unscrupulous stationer John Danter began at the end of 1591. During this period he was primarily Danter ’s editor, but his versatility enabled him to turn his hand to most parts of the printing and publishing processes. His letter to Nashe, quoted by the latter in his Have With You at Saffron Walden (1596), was signed ‘Your old Compositor, Henry Chettle’ (Ibid. p. 466). 16 This work is reprinted in G. B. Harrison (ed.), Henry Chettle's 'Kind Hart's Dream' and William Kemp's 'Nine Days' Wonder' (London and New York: Bodley Head, 1923).
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after the appearance of the Groatsworth in an attempt to quash the charges of his contemporaries that either he or Nashe had fabricated it. Nashe, Jowett explains, had no case to answer; he was dwelling out of London, in Croydon, at the time. Only Chettle had access to Greene’s papers, the duty of transcribing Greene’s Groatsworth, and that of ‘preparing’ it for publication. There are no other suspects. Jowett is careful to keep Chettle’s actions in their original context. Certainly, the ‘notion of intellectual property had weak foundations at the time’. 17 Although property rights were then held by the Stationer, not the author, this clearly does not absolve Chettle:
[f]or the Groatsworth itself provides excellent firsthand testimony that the concept of plagiarism did exist, that it could be extended even to plays that had not reached print, and even located between the dramatist and actors who realised the text in performance. 18
Returning to the Groatsworth’s remarks concerning Shakespeare, the acceptance of the possibility that Chettle rather that Greene made it, must complicate our reading of an already difficult text:
Once Greene’s authorship is denied, we find the passage deprived of its correlative in experience. The speaker is not actually the failed and bitter dramatist Greene but an imagined representation of him. A key “fact” of literary history has evaporated. But it has not
17 18
Jowett 1993, p. 476. Ibid.
7
disappeared; it is replaced with the ambiguous simul[a]crum of a fact. This, then, is the problem. The delegitimized diatribe against Shakespeare will not quietly go away. 19
But just what is this ‘delegitimized diatribe’ saying about Shakespeare? Opinions have tended to cluster around two poles: either that Shakespeare is being charged with plagiarism, specifically by Greene, of his own work, or that Shakespeare, the young actor-prodigy, has ideas above his station and is beginning to write his own material. The first surmise is championed by Edmund Malone in his 1787 Dissertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI, tending to shew that those plays were not originally written by Shakespeare, a work that has been called ‘the fountainhead of disintegrationist theories’. 20 Malone’s interpretation follows his citation of the Groatsworth passage quoted above:
That Shakespeare was here alluded to, cannot, I think be doubted. But what does the writer mean by calling him “a crow beautified by our feathers?” My solution is, that Greene and Peele were the joint-authors of the quarto plays, entitled The first part of the Contention of the two famous houses of Yorke and Lancaster, &c and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of Yorke, &c, or that Greene was the author of one, and Peele of the other. 21
The flights of Malone’s fancy aside, there can be no doubt that the three men Malone refers to knew of each other and of each other’s work—the close quarters of London’s theatrical community would have ensured that. Greene and Peele were university men,
19
Ibid. p. 482. D.V. Erdman and Ephim G. Fogel (eds.), Evidence for Authorship: Essays on Problems of Attribution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1966). I discuss critical ‘disintegration’ in section 2 below. 21 Malone 1787, p. 397. 20
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whereas Shakespeare’s official education had ended at Stratford Grammar School. Peele had taken the degree of Master of Arts at Oxford in 1579; Greene took the same degree at Cambridge in 1583. As an established actor turning his hand to playwriting, the unqualified Shakespeare was, it seemed to the author of the Groatsworth, breaking too many of the established playwrights’ rules and, according to Malone, appropriating and improving their plays. Going by the dates of Greene’s and Peele’s first printed works, 1583 and 1584 respectively, Malone thinks ‘it is highly probable’ that the originals of 2 and 3 Henry VI, Contention and True Tragedy, were written between 1583 and 1591. 22 And further: ‘I suspect they were produced in 1588 or 1589’. 23 At this point he stiffens his resolve:
We have undoubted proofs that Shakespeare was not above working on the materials of other men. His Taming of the Shrew, his King John, and other plays, render any argument on that point unnecessary. 24
These ‘undoubted proofs’ obviously do not need any elaboration as far as Malone is concerned. But what do they consist of? What exactly does ‘working on the materials of other men’ entail? If Malone means Shakespeare adopted and adapted the plots of other men, without ever inserting large chunks of their verse verbatim into his own, then Malone would be in agreement with the modern consensus. But it is clear from his Dissertation that this is not the case.
22 Greene had Mamillia, A Mirror or Looking-Glass for the Ladies of England published in 1583; Peele, The Arraignment of Paris in 1584. 23 Malone 1787, p. 398. 24 Ibid.
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Malone holds that the line famously adapted from 3 Henry VI in the Groatsworth, ‘O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide!’, was originally penned by Greene; it appears identically in the 1595 octavo of True Tragedy. Greene, to emphasise his contempt for the ‘upstart crow’ Shakespeare after his shameless bombasting of the elder playwrights’ Contention and True Tragedy into the Folio’s 2 and 3 Henry VI, redirected his own line (according to Malone) at Shakespeare, in order to publicly expose his plagiarism. 25 Shakespeare carried out what is called in Italian a ‘Rifacimento’ or rewriting of the old plays, Malone tells us:
[Shakespeare] did not content himself with writing new beginnings to the acts; he newversified, he new-modelled, he transposed many of the parts, and greatly amplified and improved the whole. Several lines, however, and even whole speeches which he thought sufficiently polished, he accepted, and introduced to his own work, without any or with very slight, alterations. In the present edition, all those lines which he adapted without any alteration, are printed in the usual manner; those speeches which he altered or expanded, are distinguished by inverted commas; and to all the lines entirely composed by himself, asterisks are prefixed. The total number of lines in our author’s Second and Third Part of K. Henry VI. is six thousand and forty-three: of these as I conceive, 1771 lines were written by some author who preceded Shakespeare; 2373 were formed by him on the foundation laid by his predecessors; and 1899 lines were entirely his own composition. 26
25
‘Bumbast was a sort of stuff of a loose texture, by which garments were rendered more swelling and protuberant’ (Ibid. p. 399). 26 Ibid. pp. 399–400.
10
Malone’s precision is still disarming more than two hundred years later. Astonishing as his remarks sound today, the essential tenets of Malone’s Dissertation were not toppled by a more complete hypothesis for nearly one hundred and fifty years. While critics after Malone begged to differ on the exact number of lines in the Henry VI plays Shakespeare was responsible for, the ‘facts’ that the two ‘old’ plays Contention and True Tragedy served as Shakespeare’s sources for the plays that appear in the Folio, and that Shakespeare had plagiarised nearly two thousand lines from those plays by Greene and Peele, were not convincingly refuted until 1929.27 In that year Peter Alexander published his Shakespeare’s ‘Henry VI’ and ‘Richard III’ which concludes that 2 and 3 Henry VI were actually composed before Contention and True Tragedy. 28 Alexander’s study and the less trumpeted contemporaneous work of Madeleine Doran dramatically turned the tide of scholarly opinion. 29 The Henry VI plays, according to Alexander, were conceived and written by Shakespeare alone. The so-called ‘old’ plays were in actuality ‘younger’ ones—pirated versions patched together by actors and recorders for commercial gain. Alexander’s Shakespeare, far from being the agent of plagiarism, was, in reality, the victim of it. Alexander built his argument on the same foundation—his interpretation of the Groatsworth passage—on which Malone had built his. He exposes Malone’s suppression of Thomas Tyrwhitt’s full opinion on the Groatsworth (published in the George
27
Not every critic agreed with Malone before 1929, of course. The earliest assertion that Contention and True Tragedy were derived from 2 and 3 Henry VI has been located in Gerard Langbaine’s New Catalogue of English Plays (1688) by MacDonald P. Jackson in ‘Langbaine and the Memorial Versions of Henry VI, Parts II and III’, NQ, 209 (1964), 134. 28 Peter Alexander, Shakespeare’s ‘Henry VI’ and ‘Richard III’ (Cambridge: CUP, 1929). Hereafter cited as ‘Alexander 1929’. 29 Madeleine Doran, ‘Henry VI, Parts II and III': Their Relation to the ‘Contention’ and the ‘True Tragedie’ (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1928).
11
Steevens–Samuel Johnson edition of Shakespeare in 1778) as a piece of critical skulduggery. It emerges that Malone selectively quoted his contemporary ‘who was the first not only to direct the attention of scholars to the punning allusion to Shakespeare, but to point out its true interpretation’. 30 Tyrwhitt had written:
Though the objections raised [by Theobald and Warburton] to the genuineness of the three plays of Henry the Sixth have been fully considered and answered by Dr. Johnson, it may not be amiss to add here, from a contemporary writer, a passage [from the Groatsworth], which…points at Shakespeare as the author of them. 31
Alexander shows how the only problems Malone’s Dissertation solves are ones that it creates itself, that:
there remains no excuse for continuing to accept Malone’s complete misinterpretation of Greene’s letter. It must be rejected as not only a contradiction to Greene’s very words, but as framed to agree with what are only Malone’s false assumptions. 32
But as we have seen, the opinions of the Groatsworth may well be those of Chettle and not Greene. After citing the pamphlet as evidence that ‘Greene regarded 3 Henry VI as a work by Shakespeare’, Alexander goes on to make his own false assumption that, if 2 and 3 Henry VI are all Shakespeare’s, then 1 Henry VI is as well.
30
Alexander 1929, p. 39. Ibid. (Quoting the Boswell–Malone edition of Shakespeare (1821), 21 vols., xviii, 551.) 32 Ibid. pp. 49–50. 31
12
Both Malone in 1787 and Alexander in 1929 caused critical sensations because of the way they interpreted a 1592 allusion to Shakespeare which they believed to have been written by Greene. They both changed the way the world thought about Shakespeare’s beginnings as a playwright and profoundly influenced the thinking of subsequent generations. Their diametrically opposed interpretations of the Groatsworth passage can, for our present purposes, be instructively described respectively as ‘disintegrationist’ (Malone’s) and ‘absolutist’ (Alexander’s). The next section explains the origin of these terms and explores their significance in contemporary Shakespeare scholarship.
0.2 Re-integrating ‘Disintegration’ E. K. Chambers, the most influential Shakespearean scholar of his generation, delivered a lecture to the British Academy in 1924 entitled ‘The Disintegration of Shakespeare’, in which he inveighed against what he saw as the undisciplined attempts of some of his contemporaries to ‘disintegrate’ the Shakespeare canon. 33 Chambers used the occasion to dissect publicly the criticism of J. M. Robertson and John Dover Wilson, ‘disintegrating critics’(25) who, though their methodologies and conclusions are completely different, both insist that Shakespeare revised, to varying degrees, the work of other playwrights. 34 Many of the plays in the accepted Shakespeare canon, they held, contain the work of other playwrights like Marlowe, Chapman, Greene, and Peele. The passion Chambers felt for the good reputation of his (which he expands at every opportunity into ‘our’) Shakespeare erupts into his prose, and the lecture
33
Printed in Aspects of Shakespeare: Being British Academy Lectures (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1933), pp. 23–48. Hereafter cited as ‘Chambers 1924’. 34 Ibid. p. 25
13
consistently employs emotive language to emphasise the polar opposition he sees between ‘us’ (himself and his audience) and ‘them’ (the ‘disintegrators’). The opening of the second paragraph, for example, suggests that the claims of the disintegrators should have the same physical effect on us as those of the anti-Stratfordians:
I propose to consider certain critical tendencies which, in their extreme manifestations, offer results hardly less perturbing than those with which the Baconians and their kin would make our flesh creep. 35
Chambers then implies that the theories—‘heresies, if you will’—of these ‘certain critical tendencies’ are blasphemous; that the disintegrators are going against God with their attacks on Shakespeare. 36 With remarks like these Chambers is hardly presenting an objective and disinterested critical point of view. But it is easy to imagine his audience transfixed by his magisterial tone, which seems to confer upon his words a divine authority. He effectively turns a critical debate over the limits of the Shakespeare canon into a Holy War and enters the lists like a crusader. It is surprising to say the least to find the scholar who introduced the terms ‘disintegration’ and ‘disintegrationist’ into the Shakespeare critical lexicon advocating six years later that Shakespeare revised the work of other playwrights to create 1 Henry VI:
Shakespeare’s presence is only clear to me in [2.4], the Temple Garden scene, and [4.2], an unrhymed Talbot scene…These I take to be new scenes, written in or later than 1594.
35 36
Ibid. p. 23. Ibid. p. 24.
14
Probably both replaced scenes of the original play; almost certainly [2.4] did, as later passages carry on the motive of the roses…As to the authorship of the original play, I feel no assurance. If Shakespeare is in it at all, it must be in [1.1, 1.3; 2.5; 3.1, 3.4; 4.1, 4.4; 5.1, 5.4. 94–end]. The evidence of F is not very strong here, since clearly by 1623 the piece was regarded as an integral part of his Henry VI. 37
Robertson and Dover Wilson, the disintegrators who bear the brunt of Chambers’s critical and religious opprobrium in his 1924 essay, constructed their theories on the same kind of foundation Chambers laid in his discussion of the authorship of 1 Henry VI six years later: personal impressions of style. This is not to say that there are no major differences in the methodologies of the three critics—rather that when attribution techniques are more subjective than objective, radical and conservative authorship hypotheses alike will always be ultimately grounded in the critic’s own idiosyncratic impressions of Shakespeare’s works and of what he would have and would not have written. It is important to stress at this juncture that Chambers can be distinguished from his predecessors, his contemporaries, and indeed most of his successors, by his espousal of an inclusive rather than exclusive philosophy concerning Shakespeare criticism: after railing against the disintegration of the canon in his lecture, in his conclusion he actually encourages his audience to be thankful for the efforts of the disintegrators. While there is certainly an element of theatricality in Chambers’s remarks—he is rather like a priest concluding a fire-and-brimstone sermon with ‘Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do’—there is also the unmistakeable conviction that our knowledge of Shakespeare is ultimately advanced by critical ‘heresy’:
37
Chambers 1930, i, 291.
15
We ought to be very grateful to Mr. Robertson and Mr. Dover Wilson. We had come to think that all the critical questions about Shakespeare were disposed of; the biographical facts and even a little more than the facts chronicled, the canon and the apocrypha fixed, the chronological order determined, the text established; that there was not much left to be done with Shakespeare, except perhaps to read him. They have shown us that it is not so; and we must now go over the ground again, and turn our notional assents, with whatever modifications may prove justified, into real assents. We have all the spring joy of re-digging a well-tilled garden. 38
His words are as relevant today as they were eighty years ago. Reading across the broad spectrum of contemporary Shakespeare criticism one quickly discovers that the complacency Chambers nobly admitted he himself was party to has persisted into the twenty-first century. The conclusion of Chambers’s essay is a most unexpected—and therefore all the more effective—volte face. It is also a brilliant piece of rhetorical structuring, whereby the assimilation of ‘them’ is promoted as the best means of identifying and shrugging off the smugness Chambers believes ‘we’ (himself and his audience) had come to feel about their knowledge of Shakespeare. With his final paragraph Chambers suddenly begins to refill the literary-critical divide separating ‘us’ and ‘them’ that he had been excavating throughout his lecture, and the borderline between the two camps becomes harder to discern. We begin to see why the scholar who thundered against what he saw as the
38
Chambers 1924, pp. 47–8.
16
disintegration of the Shakespeare canon was, just six years later, able to disintegrate 1 Henry VI in the fashion quoted above. The critics who use the term ‘disintegrationist’ today generally do so only with the opprobrium found at the opening of Chambers’s lecture. 39 They show no awareness of his last-minute exhortation of his audience to assimilate the work of disintegrationists like Robertson and Dover Wilson. In Defining Shakespeare—‘Pericles’ as Test Case, MacDonald P. Jackson refocuses the ambivalence which Chambers had built into his concept to suggest how we should best apply it to attribution studies in the twenty-first century:
Every disintegrationist finding (supposed to be bad) has its corresponding integrationist results (supposed to be good). Identifying Hand D’s pages of Sir Thomas More as Shakespeare’s may in one respect separate them from the rest of the manuscript, but it connects them with the plays of the First Folio. Determining that some scenes of the Folio’s All Is True, or Henry VIII are by Fletcher joins the play to Fletcher, as well as to Shakespeare. Belated recognition that in The Two Noble Kinsmen, absent from the First Folio, Shakespeare collaborated with Fletcher has resulted in its inclusion in Shakespeare’s Collected Works, as well as Fletcher’s. Scholarly research on All Is True and The Two Noble Kinsmen allows us to consider them together as Fletcher–Shakespeare collaborations. If George Wilkins wrote the first two acts of Pericles, this material augments his meagre literary and dramatic output: he was part-author of a masterpiece. A Middleton who helped Shakespeare on Timon of Athens gains in stature. The opening act of 1 Henry VI would be a significant addition to Thomas Nashe’s writing for the theatre. And whatever our discoveries
39
Perhaps the most striking example is Michael Hattaway (ed.), The First Part of King Henry VI (Cambridge, CUP, 1990), New Cambridge Shakespeare, hereafter cited as ‘Hattaway 1990’, which all but dismisses John Dover Wilson (ed.), The First Part of King Henry VI (Cambridge: CUP, 1952), Cambridge Shakespeare, hereafter cited as ‘Wilson 1952a’, as having been edited by a ‘notable “disintegrator”’ (p. 187).
17
about how many playwrights wrote them, the texts we analyse are neither more nor less integrated as scripts for performance than they always were. 40
My clarification of Chambers’s original concept of disintegration coupled with Jackson’s demonstration of the concept’s positive consequences for our understanding of the limits of the Shakespeare canon should relieve the term of the stigma it attracted in the twentieth century. Most contemporary critics, unlike Chambers, are not concerned about the very real problems in the Shakespeare canon and chronology that remain unsolved or, like the Chambers of the beginning of his lecture, are righteously indignant at the attempts of other critics to refine our understanding of what Shakespeare did and did not write. In ‘Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part One’, Taylor writes that by the 1960s the authorship of the play ‘had ceased to be a fit subject for scholarly investigation; it had become, instead, an article of faith’. 41 Such a scenario was inevitable after centuries of undisciplined ‘disintegration’. In ‘Shakespeare and Others’ Taylor sees fit to add a term of his own to the lexicon of Shakespeare criticism: ‘absolutist’. With this he develops an ‘us’ against ‘them’ dialectic that, unlike Chambers’s, runs throughout his article. He identifies the three premises on which he believes ‘absolutists’ base their faith in Shakespeare’s authorship of 1 Henry VI. The first is that inclusion in the First Folio testifies to Shakespeare’s unassisted authorship; the second is that 1 Henry VI was written before 2 and 3 Henry VI and the third is that works
40
MacDonald P. Jackson, Defining Shakespeare—‘Pericles’ as Test Case (Oxford: OUP, 2003), p. 9. Hereafter cited as ‘Jackson 2003’. 41 Taylor 1995, p. 147.
18
of collaborative authorship are not coherent. 42 Taylor’s use of ‘absolutists’ is obviously inspired by Chambers’s use of ‘disintegrationists’. But in the same way that no two ‘disintegrationists’ hold exactly the same premises about Shakespeare, no two ‘absolutists’ do either. Every hypothesis deserves to be judged on its own merits; not viewed through the lens of a reductive critical construct.
0.3 The Validity of the Author and Authorship Studies In The Death and Return of the Author (1998), Seán Burke observes that preparing a second edition gave him the opportunity to:
…speak more candidly about the growing breach between academic literary criticism and broad intellectual culture. This breach is marked by a ‘politics’ of theory that has little to do with politics in anything like a ‘real world’. The death of the author marks a significant point in this melancholy retreat. Looking back, it seems that an institutional affair of self-regulation (impersonalist reading) was all along masquerading as a dark truth of textual ontology (the death of the author). When one also takes into account the sheer incomprehensibility of the ‘death of the author’ to even the finest minds outside the institution, it is clear that the concept functioned to keep the non-academic at bay: thereby one more obstacle to the re-emergence of a culture of letters was put in place. 43
Burke exposes the essential Janus-faced quality of Roland Barthes’s ‘The Death of the Author’, the 1967 essay that became the manifesto of the literary theory movement. 44 Its
42
Ibid. pp. 147–53. Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998), p. ix. Hereafter cited as ‘Burke 1998’ 44 Included in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–8. 43
19
thesis was most influentially re-theorised by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, ‘strong poets of the age’ for Burke, who are shown, through his careful analysis of their works, to have created ingenious masks with which to conceal the ‘sheer incomprehensibility of the “death of the author”’. But two negatives—the death of the death of the author—do not automatically make a positive theoretical alternative, and Burke stresses how much work still needs to be done in the field before a comprehensive theory of authorship is arrived at. Filling in the background—necessarily with very broad strokes—of the contemporary theoretical status of authorship as a whole may initially seem not strictly relevant to the authorship of a play written over four centuries ago. Critics of 1 Henry VI seldom concern themselves with the author(ity) theorising of the kind pioneered by Roland Barthes, and the idea that a traditionally understood authorial Shakespeare was not the ultimate source of the world’s most popular plays has never gained wide acceptance in Shakespeare criticism. The Shakespeare authorship debate is contested, for the main part, on a very different plane, which Burke calls the ‘psychobiological’, and the sweeping claim made by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for example, that ‘the text belongs to language, and not to the sovereign and generating author’ is generally diluted when it appears in Shakespeare criticism. 45 But it would be wrong to ignore the wider ramifications of what ‘author’ and ‘text’ signify today in a discussion of the authorship of an Elizabethan play. Contemporary criticism on the changing historical conceptions of
45
This statement appears in the ‘Translator’s Preface to Of Grammatology’ in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), ix–lxxxvii, at p. lxxiv. See Burke 1998, p. 27; n. 19, p. 212. Graham Holderness, whose Shakespearean textual criticism is discussed in Chapter 3, more than flirts with Spivak’s sterile abstractions.
20
authorship and how particular eras and social structures influence the politics of authorship can inform our understanding of authorship in Shakespeare’s day, and this investigation into who can be said to have authored the text of 1 Henry VI is always conscious of the relevance of these issues to Early Modern attribution studies in the twenty-first century. As this study launches an investigation into the genesis of 1 Henry VI, it is important to reaffirm the validity of such an undertaking at a time when the same kind of complacency alluded to by Chambers in section 2 above blinds many scholars to the need for one. We can rely on three certainties at this stage: (1) that the majority of the critical studies devoted to the genesis of 1 Henry VI have denied Shakespeare’s sole authorship; (2) that today the majority of critics insist that Shakespeare was the sole author of the play, and (3) that, as Jackson proves in his definitive study of the authorship of Pericles, ‘we may undertake the task of defining Shakespeare with clear consciences, confident that painstaking scholarship enlarges knowledge and that questions about “who wrote what” really do matter’. 46
46
Jackson 2003, p. 10.
21
1 BEGINNING TO DATE 1 HENRY VI A full literary and psychological analysis [of Shakespeare’s works] can only follow and not precede the establishment of a chronology. And in the meantime we are bound to a circular process. A preliminary dating sets up impressions of temper and style, and the definition of these helps to elaborate the dating. This is inevitable, once we depart from the external evidence. The chronology can only become a complex hypothesis, pieced together from materials not in themselves conclusive, and depending for its acceptance on the success with which it combines convergent and reconciles conflicting probabilities. 1
E. K. Chambers’s William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (1930), though monumental in size and scope, was never intended to be a monolithic solidification of Shakespeare’s life and work—a handing down of ‘Shakespearean commandments’, and this is the main reason why it continues to be a seminal work in the early twenty-first century. His open-minded approach is heralded in his choice of subtitle: A Study of Facts and Problems, whereby equal status is granted to both the certainties and uncertainties surrounding Shakespeare. For obvious reasons, one rarely meets with such temperance in Shakespeare criticism. The Bard is both the most exalted and most elusive of authors in English—arguably in any language. Judgement is seldom reserved, as if it were considered a weakness for one’s overall hypothesis to
1
Chambers 1930, i, 252.
22
admit of the slightest uncertainty. Chambers, in contrast to most of those who had attempted a study on the same scale, was inclusive rather than exclusive in the construction of his hypotheses. While some have subsequently been shown to be inaccurate or in need of modification, the opening to his reconstruction of the Shakespeare chronology excerpted above is as salient today as it was seventy-five years ago. By 1930 over three hundred years of critical investigation into the plays and poems of Shakespeare had failed to establish a universally accepted chronology. In the early twenty-first century we are still without one, but in the interim scholars have been able to refine significantly some of the uncertainties that Chambers highlighted. We are still bound to a circular process, but we can now measure the circumference of that process more accurately. Chambers’s implication that a chronological hypothesis must embrace complexity before it can hope to simplify—by combining convergent, and reconciling conflicting, probabilities—became the governing principle of the most rigorous investigation into the Shakespeare chronology of the late twentieth century. The editors of the Oxford Textual Companion (1987) formulate an hypothesis that is certainly complex and not a little controversial, and in their discussion of one little known and rarely performed history play, 1 Henry VI, they consider its dating to be central to our understanding of the early Shakespeare chronology. 2 Following Chambers, the play is therefore just as crucial to our understanding of Shakespeare’s early literary style—his remarks concerning a complete Shakespeare chronology are just as pertinent to the dating of each individual play. The first of the many paradoxes
2 The Oxford editors believe 1 Henry VI to be ‘the most securely dated of all Shakespeare’s early work’ (TC, p. 133); this and the following chapter explore the accuracy of this belief.
23
a study of the genesis of 1 Henry VI encounters is that the play which today is perhaps the most ignored in the canon is also the one that is made the foundation stone for reconstructions of Shakespeare’s beginnings as a playwright. With 1 Henry VI we must therefore be especially mindful at all times of Chambers’s limiting caveat: ‘A full literary and psychological analysis [of Shakespeare’s works] can only follow and not precede the establishment of a chronology’. The first date associated incontestably with 1 Henry VI is 1623, when the Shakespeare First Folio was published, but there is even uncertainty surrounding the play on this momentous date. On 8 November of that year, the plays of Shakespeare not previously printed were entered in the Stationers’ Register in preparation for the publication of the Folio, and the entry includes a play listed as ‘The thirde parte of Henry the sixte’. 3 Chambers believed that the Folio’s 1 Henry VI is meant here because of a 1602 entry in the Register that transfers the printing rights of plays referred to as ‘The firste and Second parte of Henry the vjt…’ from Thomas Millington to Thomas Pavier. 4 These entries suggest a discrepancy between the titling of the plays on the reign of Henry VI recorded in the Stationers’ Register in 1602 and 1623 and the titles ascribed to the plays by the editors of the First Folio. From the very outset of our inquiry into the dating of 1 Henry VI then, the play’s connection with those the Folio calls 2 and 3 Henry VI appears problematic. Barring the discovery of new evidence, the exact date of the composition of 1 Henry VI will remain unknown, but as the intervening centuries have seen the play become a lynchpin for scholars trying to fix the early Shakespeare chronology,
3
Chambers 1930, i, 139. Edward Burns (ed.), King Henry VI Part 1 (London: Thomson Learning, 2000), Arden Shakespeare Third Series, hereafter cited as ‘Burns 2000’, endorses Chambers: ‘This must have been our play [1 Henry VI], the “third” part in the chronology of its publication, though not in the events it depicts’ (p. 72). 4
24
establishing an accurate date is of paramount importance. This chapter conducts an examination of the surviving external evidence that appears to date the play, before proceeding to an analysis of the internal evidence—that preserved within the Folio text (hereafter referred to as ‘F’) itself. In the early twenty-first century our task essentially consists in evaluating the layers of speculation and conjecture with which critics have coated the few unvarnished facts down the centuries. As always with Shakespeare however, the critical legacy is so copious that the exact number of layers, of assumptions made after the fact, can itself be difficult to determine. The most striking example of an assumption being dressed in the robes of fact in the contemporary criticism on 1 Henry VI is that F was composed entirely on a single occasion. 5 Since we cannot pinpoint the exact date of the play’s composition, it follows that we cannot casually assume that every line preserved in the Folio was written over a single, limited period. The possibility of revision and therefore multiple datings cannot be excluded from the reconstruction of the key dates in the life of the play prior to 1623. Most editors and critics have referenced 1 Henry VI according to what are usually described as the ‘traditional’ act and scene divisions, those used by Capell in his 1767–8 edition of Shakespeare, and for clarity, I have adopted Capell’s divisions here. 6 The uniquely baffling act and scene divisions in F will be addressed in Chapter 3, which attempts to reconstruct the nature of the copy behind 1 Henry VI. I cite the text from Michael Hattaway’s traditionally-divided 1990 New Cambridge Shakespeare edition. Whenever F is quoted, I supply Charlton Hinman’s Through-
5
John Dover Wilson was the last major editor to argue that substantial revision played a part in the genesis of the Folio text. The revision was carried out, he maintains in his 1952 Cambridge edition, before—and not after—the original performances of the play. 6 Edward Capell (ed.), Mr William Shakespeare his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 10 vols. (1767–8), vi.
25
Line-Numbers (TLN) as well as the equivalent reference in Hattaway’s edition. 7 Actscene-line references to Shakespeare’s other works are keyed to the second edition of The Riverside Shakespeare. 8
1.1 Riddling Henslowe’s ‘ne’ ‘The Diary of Philip Henslowe, owner of the Rose Theatre,’ writes R. A. Foakes in the preface to his second edition of the volume, ‘…remains the most valuable and important source for information about the working arrangements of the Elizabethan public theatres’. 9 In it we read that the first performance of a play Henslowe identified as ‘harey the vj’ took place on 3 March 1592. Two letters, ‘ne’, appear in the left margin alongside the main entry. If this play is the same one that would appear in the Folio over thirty years later as The first Part of Henry the Sixt, then Henslowe’s Diary preserves the earliest record of the first performance of a First Folio play. The extent to which 1 Henry VI is a Shakespearean play is the main concern of the present study, but this and the following chapter deliberately avoid speculation on the vexed question of its authorship in order to present the chronological evidence as clearly as possible. The Diary entry has been ceaselessly debated for centuries, and as 1 Henry VI has come to be perceived more and more as a pivotal play in Shakespeare’s early writing career, critics have been lured by the correlation: could the performance described by Henslowe make 1 Henry VI the most securely dated of all Shakespeare’s
7
Charlton Hinman, The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1968). G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (textual eds.), The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 9 R. A. Foakes (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), p. vii . Hereafter cited as ‘Foakes 2002’. 8
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plays? To answer this question, it is most sensible to begin by considering the meaning of Henslowe’s two letter marginal note: ‘ne’. In a season that ran from 19 February until 23 June 1592 at the Rose theatre, the Lord Strange’s Men began with a repertoire of twenty-one plays, to which five others were added as the season progressed. These five were identified with the prefix ‘ne’ by Henslowe before their first performance; harey the vj was the first of the ‘ne’ plays produced by the company at the Rose. The receipts from the performance of 3 March totalled 3 pounds, 16 shillings and 8 pence. 10 There were fourteen further performances of the play during that season, with the last taking place on 19 June. The play’s takings were exceptionally high and were ‘unequalled throughout Henslowe’s long management’. 11 Just what Henslowe meant when he added a marginal ‘ne’ to some of the play entries in the Diary impacts directly on the relationship between harey the vj and 1 Henry VI. Walter Greg, in his edition of the Diary (1904–08), has this to say concerning the two letters:
[They] are used, with few exceptions, to mark the first occurrence of a play, and the exceptions themselves are easily explained by the supposition that the play so designated was new to the particular company, though not to the stage in general, or that it was new in the sense that it was a revival with alterations. 12
10
Ibid. p. 16. Hanspeter Born, ‘The Date of 2, 3 Henry VI’, SQ, 25 (1974), 323–34, at p. 325. Hereafter cited as ‘Born 1974’. 12 W. W. Greg (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary, 2 vols. (London, 1904–8), i, 148. Hereafter cited as ‘Greg 1904–8’ 11
27
In 1930 Chambers reiterated Greg’s pronouncement, but was not so certain that the meaning of ‘ne’ could be ‘easily explained’. His discussion contains a distinct note of reservation absent from his predecessor’s:
Henslowe’s “ne”, whatever its precise significance, is certainly a mark attached to a play “the fyrst tyme yt wasse playde”. Generally it seems to have been a new play in the full sense. It is probable that it was sometimes an old play, given by a particular company for the first time. But there is no clear case of this last type, and there are several clear cases in which such a performance was not marked “ne”. 13
In 1961 R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert published the first edition of the Diary since Greg’s, and in the course of presenting a more contextualised account of Henslowe’s business ethics and literacy than Greg had offered, they caution that:
there is no reason to think that Henslowe made errors in his use of this unexplained note; it is better to find to an interpretation of “ne” which fits all its occurrences. Some of the plays were not new; for instance, 2 Tamar Cam is marked twice as “ne”, on 28 April 1592 (f.7v), as played by Strange’s Men, and again on 11 June 1596 (f.21.v), as played by Admiral’s Men; Alexander and Lodowick is marked “ne” on 14 January 1597 (f.25v), and again on 11 February 1597 (f.26). 14
Their first example seems to be a ‘clear case’ where the repetition can be explained as a new production of an existing play, but the second is more obscure. Though less categorical than Greg, Chambers nevertheless decided that this repetition is an error
13 14
Chambers 1930, i, 320. Foakes 2002, p. xxxiv.
28
by Henslowe. 15 Foakes and Rickert counsel against such a conclusion, pointing out that the most significant factor linking the entries marked ‘ne’ is that the takings for these performances were always high. The ‘ne’ performances of Alexander and Lodowick took 55s. and 65s. respectively, while the Diary’s daily average for plays not marked ‘ne’ ranged at different periods from about 20s. to 30s. 16 On the day of the highest takings (Tuesday or Monday), the average rises above 40s. only during the 1592 season. ‘Clearly,’ they conclude, ‘either a higher charge was made to spectators at these plays or they attracted much larger audiences.’ 17 Foakes and Rickert suggest a new possibility which covers all occurrences of ‘ne’ in the Diary: it refers to the licensing of a play-book for performance by the Master of Revels. In order for the company to recoup the sum spent on licensing, spectators may have been charged more. ‘A licence was required for a new play,’ they write, ‘presumably for a revival, at least when substantial revision had been made of the play, and also, it is probable, in a variety of other circumstances.’ 18 With Alexander and Lodowick ‘other circumstances’ may have forced the play to be withdrawn and relicensed, conceivably generating the publicity which made it an unusual success on its second appearance as ‘ne’. Nevertheless, Foakes and Rickert are careful to conclude that solutions for the meaning of ‘ne’ can at best be offered only as probabilities, with the most acceptable being those most easily reconciled with the evidence of the Diary. 19 Plainly such
15
The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), ii, 143–6. Hereafter cited as ‘Chambers 1923’. Foakes 2002, p. xxxv. Ibid. p. xxxiv. 18 Ibid. p. xxxv. 19 Winifred Frazer’s suggestion in ‘Henslowe’s “ne”’, NQ, 236 (1991), 34–5, that ‘ne’ stands for the Newington Butts theatre does not meet Foakes’s and Rickert’s criterion. She fails to acknowledge that the takings for ‘ne’ entries were always high, and that by 1592 the Newington Butts theatre was apparently an undesirable, less profitable option than the Rose. (See William Ingram, ‘The Playhouse at Newington Butts: A New Proposal’, SQ, 21 (1970), 385–98 and Foakes 2002, pp. 283–4.) 16 17
29
solutions should not be used as the sole basis for dating the composition of any play Comment [RJM1]: Americanism?
that appears in the Diary. Ironically, however, Foakes’s and Rickert’s edition has been used to do just that by E. A. J. Honigmann with respect to 1 Henry VI. Writing some fifty years after Chambers, Honigmann raised the following objection to what he identified as an insupportable generalisation in Chambers’s explanation of ‘ne’. In Shakespeare’s Impact on his Contemporaries he enlists Foakes and Rickert’s edition, which:
gives much fuller extracts from Henslowe’s pawn accounts than were printed by Greg, and we read in these that unfortunates took new clothes, etc. to the money-lender. Invariably he entered these as “new(e)”, never as “ne”—so that the diary as now published has several dozen “new(e)” spellings, but not a single “ne” other than the well known occurrence of “ne” against payments of plays. 20
Nor are the Diary’s margins too narrow to fit the three or four letters of ‘new(e)’. Honigmann again:
This consistent variation [‘ne’] strongly suggests that “ne” was not intended to stand for the word “new”…Occasionally, we know, “ne” signified “the fyrst tyme yt wasse playde”, but as Chambers’s reservations indicate, quite often “ne” meant something else—and we have no means of knowing what or how often. In the event, those who take “ne” as generally referring to a new play in the full sense run the risk of post-dating this play [1Henry VI], and all the other plays connected with it. 21
20 21
Honigmann 1982, p. 77. Ibid.
30
Comment [RJM2]: Whose? His own? Or Chambers’?
Honigmann, it transpires, needs Henslowe’s harey the vj to refer to a revival and not a completely new play because he has a bigger agenda to push. His exposition of what he identified as Henslowe’s ‘ne’ and ‘new(e)’ disparity is crucial for the viability of his ‘early start’ Shakespeare chronology. According to this, the playwright, having started writing for the stage in 1586, had by early 1592 completed ten plays, including the three Henry VI plays. The editors of the Oxford Textual Companion (1987), by contrast, tentatively place The Two Gentlemen of Verona as Shakespeare’s first play around 1590–1. 22 Because ‘quite often’ (Chambers had actually written ‘several clear cases’) ‘ne’ appears not to refer to a new play in the full sense, Honigmann argues, it therefore does not with harey the vj. Hanspeter Born had emphasised in 1974 that Greg’s ‘few exceptions’ of ‘ne’ plays not being entirely new date from a later period in Henslowe’s management, when audiences were being presented with a ‘ne’ play almost once a week:
As opposed to the practice of the later Admiral’s men, Lord Strange’s company put on only five “ne” plays in a season lasting from February to June. The first entry of a play in Henslowe’s diary, where “ne” presumably stands for a “revival with alterations,” occurs on the 29th of August 1595. Under that date Henslowe entered as “ne” “longe shancke,” generally held to be a vamped up version of Peele’s Edward I. Before then Henslowe had entered 28 plays as “ne,” and there is no evidence (with the debatable exception of Titus Andronicus) that any of these plays was not in fact new. 23
22 23
TC, p. 109. Born 1974, p. 325.
31
Born also stresses the extreme unlikelihood of the play ‘which surpassed all other Rose plays in gate as well as in performances’ being a revision of an older one. Specifics in this kind of study are few and far between, and hypotheses often involve a selective engineering of the scant surviving evidence. In Shakespeare’s Impact Honigmann conspicuously fails to discuss the connection between Henslowe’s harey the vj and 1 Henry VI. We must therefore assume either that he considers harey the vj a revision or an adaptation of Shakespeare’s 1588 (according to his dating) 1 Henry VI, or that it is another play altogether of which no trace now remains. Honigmann implies that in 1592 harey the vj could not have denoted ‘a new play in the full sense’ by Shakespeare—or indeed any other author. It is clear that pronouncements on Henslowe’s ‘ne’ cannot afford to be as confident as Greg’s or as sceptical as Honigmann’s. I turn now to the most recent investigation into the meaning of the enigmatic marginal note, which is also the most thorough. Diana Price begins her article ‘Henslowe’s “ne” and “the tyering-howsse doore”’ by reiterating what Foakes and Rickert had identified as a generally consistent feature of ‘ne’ performances: that they yielded higher than average receipts and that these must have resulted from either higher charges or larger audiences. 24 She cites Roslyn L. Knutson, who ‘speaks for most when she concludes that “ne” signifies a performance of a play that was “new or marketably new”’, before outlining her own approach:
I should like to modify these [existing] hypotheses by proposing that “ne” marks a performance at which twice the usual admission fee was charged at the doors, whether
24
Diana Price, ‘Henslowe’s “ne” and “the tyering-howsse doore”’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 42 (2003), 62–78. Hereafter cited as ‘Price 2003’.
32
that performance was—or was not—the premiere. I also propose that Henslowe’s papers contain evidence to suggest that “ne” signifies his shorthand for “twice” the usual entry fee, and that this theory can be tested by examining certain revenues collected at the Rose playhouse. 25
Price fastens on a hitherto neglected ‘word puzzle’ that Henslowe jotted down on leaf 16v of his Diary:
.m A thowsan .C. A hundred .d v hundred .l for fifte .x for tenne .v for five n for two .J for one JJ for two
Here and in a similar table on leaf 18 ‘n’ stands for two and Price suggests that ‘ne’ may stand for ‘2e,’ that is, twice the entry fee, or that it was perhaps Henslowe’s idiosyncratic shorthand for the word ‘twice’ or ‘double’. From this starting point Price carries out a comparative analysis of Henslowe’s receipts for the two highest-grossing ‘ne’ performances—harey the vj and the tragedey of the gyves (30 January 1593)— and the highest-grossing non-‘ne’ play, docter ffostose (30 September 1594), which enables her to refine the existing ‘guesstimates’ of the Rose’s capacity, our notions of
25 Price 2003, p. 62; Roslyn L. Knutson, ‘The Repertory’ in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia UP, 1997), pp. 461–80, at p. 467.
33
its pricing policy, and Henslowe’s share of the takings. She argues that as well as receiving half the receipts from the galleries, Henslowe also took half the takings from the tiring-house door which led to the lords’ room—the most expensive seating area—thought to be cubicles built directly over the stage. By surveying existing reconstructions of the Rose’s capacity and inferring that twice the usual admission price for the lords’ room was charged for ‘ne’ performances, Price applies a simple formula that effectively accounts for the discrepancies between the highest-grossing ‘ne’ and non-‘ne’ plays and demonstrates that the capacity of the Rose was much closer to 2000 than 2500. She concludes:
If “ne” signifies “twice” the usual entry fee for plays so marked between February 1592 and November 1597, then such “ne” plays may be newly-composed, newly revised, or simply promoted at twice occasion [sic]. So while it is possible to infer that many, probably most of the plays marked “ne” were new, at least to Henslowe, a “ne” annotation is not prima facie evidence that the play was newly-composed. Conversely, a non-“ne” play is not necessarily an old one. 26
Price’s interpretation is certainly the most persuasive yet presented, but it is clear that whatever Henslowe meant by ‘ne’, the marginal note alone cannot establish the composition date of harey the vj, let alone that of 1 Henry VI. Fortunately there is more external evidence suggesting a connection between Henslowe’s Diary entry and the Folio play.
1.2 Did Nashe’s Talbot Star in Henslowe’s harey the vj?
26
Price 2003, p. 73.
34
Comment [RJM3]: Why don’t you state your own position (or agreement with Price) here? This could be the right place for “persuasive”, eg. “Price’s analysis is certainly the most persuasive of those outlined here”.
It is time now to tackle the other conundrum presented by Henslowe’s famous entry: is harey the vj the same play, in the same form, as 1 Henry VI? The foregoing discussion of the meaning of marginal ‘ne’ has demonstrated that close study of Henslowe’s habits elsewhere in the Diary goes some way towards solving the puzzle. Knutson has shown that it is unlikely Henslowe was referring to 2 or 3 Henry VI as he regularly recorded the names of second and subsequent parts of multi-part plays fully. 27 But to best determine which play Henslowe’s entry refers to we need to look outside the Diary, to the testimony of Shakespeare’s contemporary, Thomas Nashe. In his Pierce Penilesse (Stationers’ Register, 8 August 1592), Nashe defends the stage against ‘shallow-braind censurers’ and stresses the educational value of plays which present moral lessons and bolster patriotism:
How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred years in his Tombe, hee shoulde triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times), who in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh from bleeding. 28
Brimful of enthusiasm for the play, Nashe employs the same epithet—‘the terror of the French’—given Talbot in both Halle’s chronicle (a major source for 1 Henry VI) and 1 Henry VI (1.4.41), and provides an eyewitness account of a play which, if not the same as that preserved in the Folio, is very similar to it. Born asserted in 1974 that ‘today nobody contests that Nashe indeed refers to
27
Roslyn L. Knutson, ‘Henslowe’s Naming of Parts’, NQ, 228 (1983), 157–60. R. B. McKerrow (ed.) The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols. (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1904–10), at i, 212. Hereafter cited as ‘Nashe’.
28
35
Shakespeare’s play’, by which he meant the play as printed in the First Folio. 29 However, in Shakespeare’s Impact, which was published eight years after Born’s article, Honigmann does indeed contest the identification, albeit not explicitly, when he implies (in an endnote) that perhaps Nashe did not associate Shakespeare with 1 Henry VI in 1592. 30 Honigmann’s ‘early start’ chronology has Shakespeare writing 1 Henry VI in 1588. 31 For his chronology to work, Honigmann must insist that Talbot’s first stage incarnation occurred four years earlier and that in 1592 the hero was merely given some new lines and suited in shinier armour. As he is conspicuously silent about 1 Henry VI’s connection with harey the vj, we cannot be sure of Honigmann’s position on the matter. Thankfully other critics have been more forthcoming on the link between Henslowe’s Diary and Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse. The record takings of harey the vj sit comfortably alongside Nashe’s ‘ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times)’, and Born convincingly contextualises as follows:
It seems altogether an unlikely coincidence that in 1592 there should have been two rival plays on the reign of Henry VI, one at The Rose by an author other than Shakespeare and one by Shakespeare acted elsewhere, which both drew huge crowds. It also seems strange that Henslowe’s fabulously successful play should have been lost without a trace. 32
29
Born 1974, p. 324. Born considers Shakespeare’s sole authorship of 1 Henry VI to be beyond question. Honigmann 1982, p. 136, n. 11. Ibid. p. 88. 32 Born 1974, p. 324. 30 31
36
The discovery that Nashe dedicated Pierce Penilesse to Lord Strange goes unremarked by Honigmann. 33 The pamphlet also showers flattery on Edward Alleyn, the then leading actor of Strange’s company, making Born’s case seemingly indisputable:
It is quite incredible that Nashe should have sung the praises of a Henry VI play performed by a rival company whose leading actor he glorifies and to whose patron he wished to ingratiate himself. 34
There is a further connection between 1 Henry VI and Lord Strange which Born fails to note: Talbot was Strange’s ancestor and the play conspicuously emphasises this fact by including ‘Lord Strange of Blackmere’ in the lengthy list of Talbot’s titles intoned by Sir William Lucy at 4.7.60–71. This would seem to neatly explain why Talbot’s part in harey the vj was ‘elaborately amplified from the meagre record of the chronicles’. 35 One of the more plausible speculations in Honigmann’s Shakespeare: the ‘lost years’, published three years after Shakespeare’s Impact, is that Shakespeare wrote Richard III for Lord Strange’s Men: the source material has clearly been manipulated in the construction of the play to flatter the company’s patron. 36 Honigmann makes no mention of the more obvious flattery of Lord Strange in 1 Henry VI, however, despite conjecturing Shakespeare was serving the nobleman from ‘1585(?)–94’.
33 ‘To be precise, the pamphlet is dedicated to “Amynthas”, who has been identified as Lord Strange. See F. P. Wilson, A Supplement to McKerrow’s Edition of Nashe (Oxford, 1958), pp. 15–16.’ (Born 1974, p. 324, n. 3.) 34 Ibid. p. 324. 35 Andrew Cairncross (ed.), Henry VI, Part One (London: Methuen, 1962), The New Arden Shakespeare, p. xl. Hereafter cited as ‘Cairncross 1962’. 36 Honigmann, Shakespeare: the ‘lost years’ (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985), pp. 63–4. Hereafter cited as ‘Honigmann 1985’.
37
It is not only the work of his contemporaries that Honigmann suppressed or was unfamiliar with. Allison Gaw had shown in 1926 how unlikely it was that harey the vj had belonged to another company before Strange’s Men performed it at the Rose in 1592—how unlikely, that is, that it was an old play revamped for a revival. Edward Alleyn, as well as being a leading actor, was also a focal point of play ownership at the time:
Of the twenty-six plays produced by Lord Strange’s Men in the periods from February 19 to June 22, 1592, and from December 29, 1592, until the closing of the playhouses on account of the plague on February 1, 1593, every play that is traceable to previous ownership by another company goes back either to the Queen’s or to the Admiral’s Men, the companies to which the Strange company’s leader, Edward Alleyn, had previously belonged, or possibly to Worcester’s Men, from whom Alleyn acquired certain plays by purchase on January 3, 1588. 37
By scrutinising Henslowe’s Diary, Gaw demonstrated that two of those, Four Plays in One and Orlando Furioso, failed and were apparently not repeated by Strange’s Company, and that A Looking-Glass for London and England fared little better, featuring only four times among the 134 performances referred to. The others, he finds:
including all of the most successful plays of the company except 1 Henry VI, were afterwards transferred to the Admiral’s Company, which Alleyn rejoined in the spring of 1594 on leaving Strange’s Men. The inference is clear. The line of connection between
37
Allison Gaw, The Origin and Development of ‘1 Henry VI’ in Relation to Shakespeare, Marlowe, Peele and Greene (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1926), p. 21. Hereafter cited as ‘Gaw 1926’. (Contrary to appearances, Allison Gaw was in fact a man.)
38
Strange’s Men and the plays of the Queen’s and Admiral’s Company was Alleyn (possibly in conjunction with his father-in-law, Henslowe), and either directly or through his influence all so obtained that were of value were carried with him when he left. 1 Henry VI, the single valuable play in the Strange repertoire not so transferred, must have been excepted because…it had not previously belonged to the Queen’s Men, but was the original property of Strange’s Men, who naturally would not part with it. 38
Already it is evident that harey the vj was exceptional in a variety of ways. Early in his Diary Henslowe enters ‘A note of suche carges as I haue layd owt a bowte my playe howsse’, under which he itemises the repair and alteration work done on the Rose in January and February 1592. 39 Greg inferred from these records that ‘the repairs must have been extensive and affected in no small degree the general structure’. 40 Born noted that the theatre was given an ‘elaborate superstructure with a loft’. 41 Gaw, never slow to speculate, devoted nearly thirty pages to his hypothesis that the action and stage directions in 1 Henry VI refer to the first known ‘theater turret’ above the ‘heavens’. The turret was a new addition, he argued, a product of the Rose renovations. Chambers dismisses much of Gaw’s copious turret conjecture in William Shakespeare, showing that the ‘heavens’ would obscure any action therein. 42 It is exceedingly unlikely, however, that the production of harey the vj, the first ‘ne’ play of the 1592–3 season, would fail to take advantage of the recent improvements to the Rose in some way. Born notes that:
38
Gaw 1926, pp. 21–2. Foakes 2002, pp. 9–13. Greg 1904–8, ii, 49. 41 Born 1974 , p. 326. 42 Chambers 1930, i, 293. 39 40
39
A striking feature of 1 Henry VI is the substantial number of scenes which call for acting on levels higher than the platform stage. In six scenes players appear both on the platform stage and on the upper stage. 43
The external evidence connecting harey the vj with Nashe’s Talbot and 1 Henry VI is unmistakably complementary: the record takings of Henslowe’s play suggest that it caused a sensation; it would be only natural for Nashe to showcase the most outstanding (for all the right moral and patriotic reasons) recent theatrical production in his defence of the stage. Both Nashe and the author(s) of 1 Henry VI flatter Lord Strange, who was a descendant of Talbot. That harey the vj was new in the fullest sense in 1592 is further supported by Gaw’s examination of play ownership in Strange’s 1592–3 season. The evidence from Henslowe’s Diary detailing repairs and additions to the Rose immediately before the ‘ne’ performance of harey the vj correlates with the striking amount of multi-level action called for in 1 Henry VI . We have now come to the point where the external and internal evidence dating the play intersect. The next section surveys the chronological evidence preserved in the Folio text itself.
1.3 An Up-To-The-Minute History Play John Dover Wilson, in his 1952 Cambridge edition of the play, shows more convincingly than any other critic that Henslowe’s Diary records the first performances of the play printed thirty-one years later as The first Part of Henry the
43
Born 1974, p. 326.
40
Sixt. 44 He accounted for harey the vj’s full houses and record gate-money more comprehensively than his predecessors and indeed some of his successors. The play certainly appears to have appealed directly to the audience’s emotions, which, he suggested, was the quickest way to their purses. But why was this play so extraordinarily successful? Dover Wilson answers this question by surveying the historical events of 1591:
As with Henry V in 1599 so with 1 Henry VI in 1592, the production of a heroic play was connected with the fortunes of an expeditionary force dispatched from [England’s] shores under the leadership of the brilliant and popular Earl of Essex. 45
But whereas Henry V united England and divided and conquered France, Henry VI lost his father’s French empire and was powerless to stop his own kingdom descending into civil war. At the time of harey the vj’s first performance on 3 March 1592, the play ‘gave an outlet to the growing sense of exasperation, anger, and even despair which was felt in London at the impending failure of an invasion of France in the autumn of 1591’. 46 During the last years of Elizabeth’s reign England was repeatedly at war and, citing E .P. Cheyney’s History of England, 1588–1603 (1926), Dover Wilson shows that of all the expeditions launched during that era, none provoked keener popular interest than the 1591 assault on Normandy. 47 1 Henry VI, he asserts, is a ‘permanent memorial’ to that interest. The main objective of the invasion was to capture Rouen,
44
Wilson 1952a, pp. xiv–xxi. Ibid. pp. xv–xvi. Ibid. p. xvi 47 Ibid. 45 46
41
the capital of Normandy and its key fortress. After months of unforeseen delay attended by disease and desertion, the demoralised English forces finally laid siege to Rouen on 29 October. Although the city was not officially relieved until 10 April the following year by Parma and his Spanish army, the siege was already an ‘acknowledged failure’ by Christmas 1591. As early as 8 January Essex was on his way back to England, his reputation in tatters. Dover Wilson demonstrates how the play’s violently haphazard treatment of its historical sources can be attributed at least in part to contemporary London’s preoccupation with events across the Channel: the most topical scenes, those dealing with the siege of Rouen (3.2–3), are wholly unhistorical. He envisages the play as having been analogous to a newsreel report from the trenches outside the besieged city and believes it was written by playwrights in close contact with men who had been in the trenches. He finds support for this hypothesis in a comparison of two eyewitness accounts of the doomed 1591 siege of Rouen with the dialogue and action of the siege scenes in the play. 48 In addition, these accounts preserve behind-the-scenes aspects of the invasion, which Dover Wilson speculates were also represented on stage:
The scene (2.3) of the visit that Talbot pays to the Countess in her castle, which again has no parallel in the chronicles, seems to be suggested by similar visits of young English officers to ladies in neighbouring castles or even nunneries when, owing to misty conditions or some other cause, fighting was not the order of the day. 49
48 49
Ibid. pp. xviii–xxi. Ibid. pp. xix–xx.
42
Comment [RJM4]: “behind-thescenes” might be a nice pun.
Furthermore, the sexual promiscuity of Charles the Dauphin in the play seems to have been intended to reflect that of the reigning French king Henri IV. 50 Dover Wilson’s argument that the 1591 invasion of France informed both military and non-military episodes in 1 Henry VI is a persuasive one:
[I] have said enough, I hope, to show that the siege of Rouen was much in mind both with those who wrote and with those who first witnessed this, to us poor, but to them exciting, drama; and that the author or authors had ransacked the chronicles to find analogies to the French campaign of 1591–2 in those of 1422–50. 51
This detailed historical correlation answers most objections to the identification of Henslowe’s harey the vj with 1 Henry VI, but it does so rather too sweepingly. The main strength of Dover Wilson’s scholarship is his attention to the minutiae of a play’s genesis; its main weakness is his conviction that he can explain everything about the Shakespeare canon and chronology. We cannot know for certain how much of 1 Henry VI was actually performed in 1592—whether any revision took place during the more than thirty-year interval before the play was eventually printed. The possibility of revision ought not to be ignored, and it is surprising that Dover Wilson, of all scholars, did not admit of such a possibility when, as Gary Taylor points out, his criticism is informed by a lifelong proclivity for revision theories. 52 The question of whether 1 Henry VI was in any way revised prompts the question of who the reviser or revisers may have been. We are now getting ahead of ourselves: many cases have been made for a considerable number of scenes and some parts of scenes in 1 Henry
50
Ibid. p. xx. Ibid. p xxi. 52 Taylor 1995, p. 169. 51
43
VI having been written at different times after 1592; these arguments and the evidence presented in support of them are fully evaluated in the next chapter. I refer once again to my conviction that in order to make the muddied fountain of the genesis of 1 Henry VI run clear (or at least as clear as possible), the twin confusions of the play’s date and authorship need to be examined separately at first—this conviction is based on the painstaking analysis of my major predecessors’ attempts to establish who wrote the play and when. In the name of clarity then, I continue to leave the authorship question waiting in the wings until as much of the chronological ‘traffic’ has been cleared from the stage as possible. We now turn to a discussion of the order of composition of the three plays on the reign of Henry VI.
1.4 2, 3, 1 Henry VI? In ‘Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part One’, Taylor concludes his combative survey of the chronology of the Henry VI plays with the following:
I would not here wish to claim that Part One unequivocally must date from the spring of 1592 or that it must postdate Duke of York [3 Henry VI]. But if we consider the evidence of date and sequence without making any presuppositions about authorship, then the evidence clearly points to both those conclusions. If we reject the evidence as “not good enough,” then we must also abandon any attempt to date the early part of the canon, for the evidence for other plays is less consistent and less reliable than the evidence for Part One. 53
53
Ibid. pp. 152–3.
44
I say ‘combative’ because it is extremely difficult for ‘non-absolutist’ critics to prevent an adversarial tone creeping into their scholarship. Those who hold that the three plays were written in the Folio order overwhelmingly outnumber those allied with Taylor. Facing such apparently insurmountable odds, one has to throw down many gauntlets before engaging all adversaries. When Taylor was writing, at the close of the twentieth century, the Peter Alexander-born modern orthodoxy had become so entrenched that anything less than a confrontational approach would have failed to make any sort of impression. Ultimately Taylor had to and indeed did shock the modern orthodoxy into recognising his challenge. As my Introduction has demonstrated, Taylor fights fire with fire—if he is a ‘disintegrationist’ for arguing that Shakespeare did not write all of 1 Henry VI and that it post-dates 2 and 3 Henry VI, then the critics who insist that he did write all of 1 Henry VI before 2 and 3 Henry VI are ‘absolutists’. Critical opprobrium, of course, can work in any direction: that a few ‘absolutists’ have been sufficiently roused to try and counter Taylor’s arguments represents a huge achievement in itself. 54 Since Alexander, very little common ground has been established between these polar opposites, and Taylor realised that only the critical equivalent of a rude awakening would make an ‘absolutist’ sit up and take notice. The present study attempts at all times to ‘walk the line’ between ‘absolutism’ and ‘disintegrationism’, terms which are too often employed to reduce the complex issue at hand to a kind of
54 Hattaway read an unpublished draft of ‘Shakespeare and Others’ while preparing his 1990 New Cambridge edition of the play, in which he rejects Taylor’s hypothesis after barely engaging with it. The attempt made by J. J. M. Tobin to discredit Taylor’s attribution of the first act of the play to Nashe in ‘A Touch of Greene, Much Nashe, and All Shakespeare’ in Thomas A. Pendleton (ed.), ‘Henry VI’: Critical Essays, (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 39–55, hereafter cited as ‘Tobin 2001’, is discussed in section 1 of Chapter 5.
45
Manichean dichotomy. The defence of their own subjective conception of Shakespeare has distracted many critics from the pursuit of critical objectivity—the critical heritage trail is littered with examples of Shakespeare being taken personally. Scholarly investigations into the canon and chronology of Shakespeare have too often been based ultimately not on the impartial weighing of all the available evidence but on articles of personal faith. As the following survey will demonstrate, this tendency remains dominant today in the criticism on 1 Henry VI. Exposing this kind of critical malpractice enables us to see the evidence for what it is, with all speculation and conjecture acknowledged for what it is. The dating of 2 and 3 Henry VI is crucial to our understanding of the genesis of 1 Henry VI. Taylor identifies a key premise held by Shakespeare ‘absolutists’: that 1 Henry VI was written before 2 and 3 Henry VI. 55 Accordingly, any stylistic and dramaturgical inconsistencies within 1 Henry VI and between it and the other Henry VI plays are usually attributed to its having been written in the earliest period of Shakespeare’s extant work. These same critics usually also claim the play was the tentative beginning of a hugely ambitious trilogy (even tetralogy, including Richard III), the likes of which had never been seen before. 56 But if 1 Henry VI post-dates its stable mates, then a different explanation for its mostly ‘primitive’ style is needed. Further, any trilogy or tetralogy becomes, according to Taylor:
an artistic afterthought, not the product of the aspiring vision of a young prodigal genius. Those who insist that Shakespeare wrote all of Part One must therefore insist that Part
55
Taylor 1995, p. 149. Taylor emphasises that Thomas Dekker’s The First Introduction of the Civil Wars of France (1599) was written after Parts 1, 2, and 3 of The Civil Wars of France (1598, Dekker and Drayton) and that Chettle began working on The Rising of Cardinal Wolsey immediately after completing Cardinal Wolsey’s Life. Ibid, pp. 199–200, n. 14. 56
46
One was written first. But since we know that spinoffs from a successful play sometimes take the form of a dramatic prelude, rather than a chronological sequel, the assumption that chronological priority results from priority of composition is evidently unwarranted. 57
Comment [p5]:
A reassessment of the evidence already collected, both external and internal, and of the conclusions subsequently drawn from that evidence has to begin by returning to the infamous contemporary pamphlet believed to contain the first surviving reference to Shakespeare’s theatrical career in print: Greene’s Groatsworth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance. As described in my Introduction, the pamphlet was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 20 September 1592 and purported to be the swan song of the dramatist Robert Greene, who died on 3 September of the same year. Our primary concern here is the pamphlet’s specific allusion to 3 Henry VI’s ‘O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide!’(I. iv.137) in its description of the ‘upstart Crow’ as having a ‘Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde’. However divided scholars may be as to what the pamphlet means to say about whom, and indeed who actually authored it, ultimately it is its date and this theatrical allusion that are relevant to the dating of 1 Henry VI. In his 1787 Dissertation, Edmond Malone claims to have proved that the 1594 quarto Contention and the 1595 octavo True Tragedy were the source plays which Shakespeare ‘bombasted’ (by which Malone means a combination of plagiarism, revision and new additions) into 2 and 3 Henry VI respectively. 58 He maintains that
57
Ibid. p. 149. Taylor was by no means the first to suggest 1 Henry VI was written after 2 and 3 Henry VI; in the eighteenth century Capell had conjectured that our play had been written ‘some considerable time’ after 2 and 3 Henry VI. See C. A. Greer, ‘The Place of 1 Henry VI in the York–Lancaster Tetralogy’, PMLA, 53 (1938), 687– 701, at p. 687. 58 For Malone’s definition of ‘bumbast’ see my Introduction, p. 10, n. 25 above.
47
Greene and Peele were the joint-authors of Contention and True Tragedy or ‘that Greene was the author of one, and Peele of the other’, and dates the production of these plays to 1588 or 1589. 59 Malone devotes most of his attention to 2 and 3 Henry VI, and makes only a few fleeting references to the date of 1 Henry VI. These are embedded in his discussion of the printing of Contention and True Tragedy in 1594 and 1595. In the citation below Malone makes two claims that immediately concern us, however: that 1 Henry VI was originally a stand-alone play and that Shakespeare was in no way associated with it:
if that which is now distinguished by the name of The First Part of King Henry VI. but which I suppose in those times was only called “The historical play of King Henry VI.” if this was the production of some old dramatist, if it had appeared on the stage some years before 1591, (as from Nashe’s mention of it seems to be implied,) perhaps in 1587 or 1588, if its popularity was in 1594 in its wane, and the attention of the publick was entirely taken up by Shakspeare’s alteration of two other plays which had likewise appeared before 1591, would not the superior popularity of these two pieces, altered by such a poet, attract the notice of the booksellers? and finding themselves unable to procure them from the theatre, would they not gladly seize on the originals [Contention and True Tragedy] on which this new and admired writer had worked, and publish them as soon as they could, neglecting entirely the preceding old play, or First Part of King Henry VI. (as it is now called) which Shakspeare had not embellished with his pen? 60
It is important to recall at this stage that Malone’s Dissertation was not toppled from its critical pedestal until 1929—one hundred and forty years after its publication.
59 60
Malone 1787, p. 397. Ibid. pp. 405–6.
48
Comment [RJM6]: This sounds apologetic, but I don’t think that’s necessary. The citation is not much longer than others.
Consequently, his belief that the three plays on the reign of Henry VI printed in the Folio were never planned as a trilogy remained the standard view in Shakespearean scholarship for all that period. While individual critics begged to differ, most followed Malone in thinking that the plays were never planned as a trilogy and that their Folio nomenclature was a construct of its editors, Heminge and Condell. In his 1929 Shakespeare’s ‘Henry VI’ and ‘Richard III’, Alexander reverses Malone’s hypothesis, insisting on the priority and originality of the 2 and 3 Henry VI over Contention and True Tragedy. The so-called ‘old’ plays were in fact ‘younger’ plays; pirated versions of the wholly Shakespearean Folio plays patched together by actors and recorders for commercial gain. Alexander’s Shakespeare, far from being the agent of plagiarism, was in fact the victim of it. Since 1929 most critics have essentially agreed with Alexander’s refutation of Malone: Contention and True Tragedy post-date 2 and 3 Henry VI. Assuming that the three plays were written in their Folio order, Alexander has to deny the identification of the Folio play with Henslowe’s harey the vj, which must have been another play on the same subject, for although:
Comment [RJM7]: Good idea!
Shakespeare became a member of [Strange’s] Company, now called the Chamberlain’s Company, after their return to London in the summer of 1594…there is no evidence that he wrote anything for them before 1594, although their repertory is known in considerable detail. This important negative evidence agrees with the positive indications that he was a member of Pembroke’s Company before that Company went on tour. He cannot very well then be considered the author of the play put on at the Rose for the first time on 3 March 1592 by Strange’s men. 61
61
Alexander 1929, p. 189.
49
Both Malone in 1787 and Alexander in 1929 dramatically changed the way the world viewed Shakespeare’s beginnings as a playwright. In the frenzy of their works’ reception, inevitably minor and occasionally even major inconsistencies in their arguments were overlooked beneath the all-embracing myth generated by their creators’ reputations. A substantial period of time elapsed before dissenting voices were raised, let alone listened to impartially. The complete volte face of scholarly thinking in 1929 generated an unprecedented unanimity among all kinds of Shakespeare scholars, not just textual and bibliographical ones. Alexander’s hypothesis seemed, more completely than any published before it, to remove all of the uncertainties surrounding the provenance of the Henry VI plays. The textual mysteries that had dogged studies of the plays for centuries had been solved. Shakespeare was now unquestionably the sole author of the three plays he had conceived as a trilogy. As this new confidence pervaded the ensuing criticism of the plays in which assumption after assumption went unsubstantiated, the more than considerable textual inconsistencies within and between the three plays were explained away as nothing more than Shakespeare’s experiments with different styles at the start of his career, in order to establish which approaches worked best in the theatre. Only comparatively recently have studies emerged that rigorously question the foundations of the modern orthodoxy, the most potent of which is Taylor’s. In ‘Shakespeare and Others’ Taylor thoroughly re-examines the chronology of the Henry VI plays, and shows that while Born’s case for 1 Henry VI being Henslowe’s harey the vj and therefore new in March 1592 is sound, his arguments for the Henry VI plays having been written in the Folio order rely too heavily on conjecture. In a highly compressed hypothesis Born relies largely on superficial 50
references to support his belief that 1 Henry VI ‘was written in the last months of 1591 and the first weeks of 1592’ and that 2 and 3 Henry VI were written between March and August of 1592, all exclusively by Shakespeare: 62
It would have been unsatisfactory to put on Part 2 without having it followed almost immediately by Part 3. Consequently, Shakespeare was forced to finish the whole trilogy before Part 2 could be performed. It is therefore not surprising that we look in vain in Henslowe’s diary for the “second parte of harey the vj.” Less than four months separated the first performance of I Henry VI from the closure of the theatres on June 23 [on account of plague]. This time was too brief for Shakespeare to complete 2 and 3 Henry VI and for the actors to learn their parts. However, it is not unreasonable to suppose that Shakespeare finished the two sequels by late July or early August, particularly as he was free from acting after June 23. It must be kept in mind that the inhibition on acting was originally only to last until Michelmas. It would have been only natural for the players to put the weeks of enforced inactivity to good use by preparing the new season, discussing and rehearsing new plays. At one of these readings or rehearsals Greene could easily have picked up the “Tygers heart” line, which he was to fling at Shakespeare in Groatsworth. 63
It is certainly surprising that Born, after arguing so cogently for 1 Henry VI being Henslowe’s harey the vj, and therefore a completely new play in 1592, abandoned all scholarly rigour in the second half of his article and presented the kind of subjective speculation we read above. His hypothesis is so blatantly flawed it is hard to know where to begin disproving it. It is as if he were relying on his trenchant demonstration of the date of 1 Henry VI to silence all possible objections to his arguments for the
62 63
Born 1974, pp. 331–4. Ibid. p. 332.
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date of 2 and 3 Henry VI, the main subject of his article. Nonetheless twenty years passed before Taylor exposed some of the unwarranted assumptions in his hypothesis, which shows the extent to which Alexander’s legacy had rendered the provenance of
Comment [RJM8]: Maybe you could tell us who this was: Taylor? E.g. More than 20 years passed before Taylor exposed… Also, as Born’s hypothesis is “blatantly flawed” and 20 years is a long time, you might introduce this sentence by “Even so” or “Nonetheless”.
the Henry VI plays a moot point in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the first part of his article Born enlists the work of Gaw, who showed how unlikely it was that harey the vj had belonged to another company before its appearance in Henslowe’s Diary. What Born does not mention is that Gaw also demonstrated both that it was extremely unlikely Strange’s Men had owned the other two Henry VI plays before the end of their season at the Rose from 29 December 1592 to 1 February 1593 (if they had, they would surely have performed all three together), and that the evidence connecting Shakespeare to the company at that time is slight to say the least. 64 Born’s notion that it is ‘unsatisfactory’ for 2 Henry VI not to be immediately followed on the stage by 3 Henry VI, and his contention that therefore ‘Shakespeare was forced to finish the whole trilogy before Part 2 could be performed’, are unsupported and indeed unsupportable assumptions which appear to be designed to distract us from the cold hard fact that Henslowe’s Diary makes absolutely no mention of 2 and 3 Henry VI during the season spanning the end of 1592 and the beginning of 1593. It is simply unthinkable that Strange’s Men, having had all three Henry VI plays in their possession since August (according to Born), would not take full advantage of that brief window of playing between outbreaks of plague to present the trilogy. Born’s hypothesis also contradicts everything we know of the theatrical practices of the time. The first two-part play, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, was
64
Gaw 1926, pp. 27, 165, 168.
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Comment [RJM9]: I would have thought this was uncountable. How about “suppositions”, “hypotheses”, “assumptions”?
not conceived as such—it ‘grew’ into two parts only after the unprecedented success of the original play. 65 In the late 1580s and early 1590s official intolerance of the theatre and the constant threat of plague shutting the theatres made the business one of the most precarious in London. In this climate the likelihood of an apparently unknown actor-cum-playwright conceiving his first work for a company as not just a two-part play but a trilogy (never before attempted) or even, as some critics maintain, a tetralogy, has to be considered remote to say the least. The historical norm that emerges from the examination of records of the period is that the writing of an additional part, whether a sequel or prequel, was dependent on the financial success of a play rather than a stipulation of the initial commission. Even if Shakespeare began writing 2 Henry VI hard on the heels of 1 Henry VI, an emphatically successful play in the theatre, whether or not he had always planned to, the idea that he would wait until he had completed two sequels before presenting them to the commissioning company goes against everything we know of play production in Elizabethan England. All the extant evidence, especially that from Henslowe’s Diary, points to acting companies operating on very tight margins. Accordingly it seems far more likely that if there was a real possibility of having 2 Henry VI finished and ready for performance before the theatres were closed on 23 June, then no company could have afforded to wait for another complete play to be written before performing it. At the very outset of his career as a playwright, Shakespeare was in no position to put his own artistic vision or integrity before the financial success of the company he was writing for. The evidence suggests that if the Henry VI plays were written in the Folio
65
See Taylor 1995, p. 149.
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Comment [RJM10]: I made this change to avoid 2 “could haves” in 1 sentence.
order, as Born insists, 2 Henry VI would have been rushed onto the boards as quickly as possible to take maximum advantage of the success of 1 Henry VI. Born’s ideas on how long Shakespeare would have taken to write 2 and 3 Henry VI conflict with what we know of his habits throughout his writing career. From 1594, when he bought a share in the newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s Men, he wrote on average two plays a year. 66 Born asks his readers to accept that in the first eight months of 1592 the fledging playwright wrote 1, 2 and 3 Henry VI (all of which are longer than most contemporary plays), and that he composed them at nearly three times the rate he maintained from 1594 to 1613. While it is not inconceivable that this may have occurred, it is hardly the most likely scenario. It is clear, then, that Born’s hypothesis is essentially a case of his wanting to have his critical cake and eat it too. While Greene appears to have known about the eponymous hero of Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse some months before the pamphlet was printed, Born fails to stress that the pair enjoyed a close working relationship and that the Groatsworth establishes a stark opposition between the ‘onely Shake-scene’ and ‘Greene’s’ addressees. The author warns them to have nothing to do with the ‘upstart Crow’, a warning that is difficult to reconcile with him attending the rehearsals of a forthcoming play by his avowed enemy. One imagines that if Born had identified this contradiction, he would have claimed that Greene could easily have disguised himself so as not to be noticed at the rehearsals. The road of speculation is invitingly broad, and by the end of his article, Born has passed the point of no return.
66
Gerald Eades Bentley, in The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971), hereafter cited as ‘Bentley 1971’, reviews all the applicable evidence and, utilising Chambers’s chronology (Chambers 1930, i, pp. 270–1), concludes that it ‘is clear enough’ that Shakespeare averaged ‘two plays per year from the season of 1590–1591 to that of 1607–1608, and after that, [he wrote] six plays (including two collaborations) in the next five years’ (p. 125).
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The tangle Born got himself into in his 1974 study represents the last serious attempt by an ‘absolutist’ scholar to explain the manifold chronological inconsistencies within and between the Henry VI plays. Shakespeare criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century exhibited a decisive movement away from the close textual analysis of Shakespeare’s plays; the practice had become associated in the minds of most scholars with the increasingly criticised methods of the New Bibliographers and the reviled ‘disintegrationists’. When one breaks from the ranks of contemporary Shakespeare criticism and actually looks closely at the texts of the Henry VI plays, it soon becomes clear that questions of who wrote them and when are not easily answered. The nature and extent of the inconsistencies within and between the plays are unique in the Shakespeare canon. To hold, as the modern orthodoxy does, that the exceptional inconsistencies are the expected stumblings attendant upon Shakespeare’s first steps, while also arguing that he conceived and wrote the plays as a unified trilogy, or even, with Richard III, a tetralogy, an achievement that could only be ascribed to an established and accomplished playwright, is itself inherently inconsistent. It is time now to undertake what has become so unfashionable in the last fifty years—an investigation into what the texts themselves tell us about the chronology of the Henry VI plays.
1.5 The Testimony of the Texts R. B. McKerrow (1872–1940) died before he could realise his ambition of editing Shakespeare’s Complete Works, but his unpublished typescript of the first volume, which was to contain Henry VI and Richard III, has been preserved in the Bodleian
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library. 67 His galley proofs record striking evidence from the texts of the Henry VI plays challenging the easy assumption that the plays were written in the order they are printed in the Folio. McKerrow directs us back to Henslowe’s harey the vj and issues a fresh challenge to the assumption that 1 Henry VI was the first play of a planned trilogy: if it was, it seems unlikely that Henslowe would consistently identify it by the name of a character played by a boy actor who speaks only 179 lines (6.5 percent of the text), appears in just five scenes, and does not appear at all until 3.1. In no other extant Elizabethan history play is an English king played throughout by a boy actor. 68 There would have been no doubt in the minds of the spectators as they left the Rose theatre about the identity of the protagonist: Talbot, ‘the terror of the French’. Nashe makes no mention of King Henry VI in his Pierce Penilesse. Before Alexander, most critics had assumed that there was an old Talbot play (referred to by Nashe) that Shakespeare reworked to form 1 Henry VI. 69 Taylor suggests that if 1 Henry VI were ‘cashing in upon the success of two other plays on Henry’s reign, then it probably would have been called, by its author(s) and Henslowe, “Harey the vj”’. 70 He makes the point that Henslowe is uncharacteristically consistent in identifying the play as ‘harey the vj’, and that such a title would be misleading to the public if it was not designed to align the play with two recently produced plays on the same reign.
67
Taylor 1995, p. 200, n. 17. See Gaw 1926, p. 26; Hattaway 1990, pp. 38, n. 9, 63; Burns 2000, pp. 30, 298, 302–3. 69 This hypothesis was first suggested by Maurice Morgann in his Essay on the Dramatic Character of Falstaff (London: T. Davies, 1777), in which 1 Henry VI is described as ‘a drum and trumpet thing’, and was most recently reformulated by Kristian Smidt in Unconformities in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1982). 70 Taylor 1995, p. 152. 68
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Comment [RJM11]: Your scholarly duty would dictate that you confirm this. Alternatively you could just describe it as “highly unusual” or even “perhaps unique”.
McKerrow’s point exerts considerable pressure on the orthodox chronology. He increases this pressure when he notes that in 1 Henry VI the factions of Lancaster and York identify themselves with either a red or white rose. A whole scene (2.4) is devoted to explaining this symbolism, and in 4.1 it becomes the focus of the dramatic action. 3 Henry VI also repeatedly refers to the use of roses by the two rival factions, but 2 Henry VI unexpectedly gives no indication that roses are worn, with the sole reference to roses in the play coming in York’s line: ‘Then will I raise aloft the milkwhite rose’ (I.i.254). This curious pattern prompts Taylor to ask:
If the three parts of the play were written in their chronological order, why should the author go to such trouble to initiate the roses symbolism in Part One only to ignore it in Contention (Part Two)…? 71
William Montgomery queries the distribution of the name ‘Plantagenet’ across the plays, which exhibits the same pattern. 72 It appears twelve times in 1 Henry VI, in connection with York and his descendants, and fourteen times in 3 Henry VI, in the same context. 2 Henry VI registers just one occurrence, in IV.ii, when the rebel Cade includes it in his bogus claim to royal blood. The correspondence of these distributions is suggestive, as are several further inconsistencies noted by other scholars. The relentless interrogation that Dover Wilson subjects the Henry VI plays to in his Cambridge editions yields a plethora of ‘textual confessions’ that further compromise the orthodox chronology insisted upon by the ‘absolutists’. We have seen above how Henslowe’s harey the vj ought to have
71 72
Ibid. p. 150. Ibid. p. 200, n. 18.
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come down to us as Henslowe’s Talbot, the name of its protagonist, had the play been the first in the London theatres on the reign of Henry VI. Dover Wilson observes that ‘the terror of the French’ is completely unknown to the characters in 2 Henry VI:
How comes it that Talbot, the hero of Part I, is never once mentioned in Part II? True, by that time “the sweet war-man is” dramatically, though not historically, “dead and rotten”. But in the first scene of Part II Gloucester gives a list of those who had shed their blood in France to preserve what Henry V had won, and overlooks the name of Talbot altogether. Is that not very strange? And is it not still stranger—quite incomprehensible indeed if the three Parts were written in the Folio order—that among the names he does cite are those of Somerset and “brave York”, who are represented in Part I as factious traitors responsible for Talbot’s death? 73
Born believes the answer to Dover Wilson’s questions to be ‘simple’: Shakespeare does not mention Talbot in 2 Henry VI because ‘the character is dead and mentioning it would be dramatically distractive’.74 He cites T. W. Baldwin’s On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare’s Plays 1592-1594 in support of his position:
[Gloucester] makes no flourish of allusion to the glorious dead, where many more than Talbot would have had to be included. Also Somerset and ‘brave York’ were very much alive and present. So they needed to be persuaded, however grand rascals Gloucester may have considered them to be. 75
73
Wilson 1952a, p. xiii. Born 1974, p. 327. Ibid.; T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare’s Plays 1592-1594 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959), pp. 335–6. Hereafter cited as ‘Baldwin 1959’. 74 75
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Baldwin’s remarks are quite simply a misrepresentation of Gloucester’s speech in the first scene of 2 Henry VI (ll. 75–103) in which he almost immediately alludes to the ‘glorious dead’—his brothers Henry V and Bedford (the latter of course died in 1 Henry VI at 3.2.114). Contrary to Baldwin’s slant, there is no hint of the politic in the Gloucester of 2 Henry VI: the play meticulously establishes him as the pillar of the old, altruistic order toppled by the new, self-seeking one. Baldwin’s completely unfounded attribution of a Machiavellian ends-justify-the-means consciousness to the Protector with the words ‘however grand rascals Gloucester may have considered them to be’ flies in the face of the play’s carefully plotted tragic structure. In his 1977 The Origins of Shakespeare, Emrys Jones believes he can answer Dover Wilson’s query concerning Talbot’s erasure from the books of memory in 2 Henry VI:
A reply to this question, which is an interesting one, must…appeal to the peculiar blend of continuity and discontinuity which we find in these plays. It is…a question of the dramatist’s tact, his concern to seize the audience’s attention, guide it in the appropriate channels, and not offer any disruptive distractions. 76
One might be forgiven for asking how the audience is not disruptively distracted by the plays’ ‘peculiar blend of continuity and discontinuity’. For Jones too then, the mention of Talbot in 2 Henry VI would have been a distraction for the audience. His reply to Dover Wilson wastes no time moving from the particular to the general: his invocation of ‘the peculiar blend of continuity and discontinuity we find in these
76 Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 136. Hereafter cited as ‘Jones 1977’.
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plays’ seems designed to smooth over the individual inconsistencies in the texts. His choice of words marks out the Henry VI plays as unlike any other Shakespearean plays, however, which ought to stimulate further investigation as to why this should be. Jones explains this peculiarity by prescribing the dramatist’s intentions at the time of writing. This is always a precarious modus operandi and usually involves selectively reading the text to fit one’s perceptions of it, as we can see here when we consider Jones’s citation of Gloucester’s crucial speech:
“What! did my brother Henry spend his youth, His valour, coin, and people, in the wars?… Have you yourselves, Somerset, Buckingham, Brave York, Salisbury, and victorious Warwick, Receiv’d deep scars in France and Normandy? Or hath mine uncle Beaufort and myself, With all the learned Council of the realm, Studied so long…debating to and fro How France and Frenchmen might be kept in awe? (I. i. 73–87)” 77
With the first ellipsis Jones omits five lines, two of which inconveniently (for Jones) mention Bedford, casualty of 1 Henry VI, and, by Jones’s own reasoning, a distraction in 2 Henry VI:
And did my brother Bedford toil his wits, To keep by policy what Henry got?
77
Ibid. p. 137.
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Comment [RJM12]: “frame” sthg “to” sthg? Perhaps “selectively reading the text to fit the critic’s perceptions”?
(I.i.83–4)
Jones’s analysis of Gloucester’s speech again privileges the general over the particular and is again concerned with intentions, this time those of Gloucester ‘(or Shakespeare)’:
Gloucester is speaking passionately, rhetorically, and tendentiously. What he says inevitably involves simplification and omission. It is useless to look in his speech for a fair summary of what we have seen happening in Part One. Gloucester (or Shakespeare) is addressing himself to the present situation and what follows from it. It suits Gloucester to assume that York and Somerset were heroes of the French wars: the fact that in Part One they had helped to seal Talbot’s doom is not relevant here; it is certainly inconvenient to remember it. For they are present and Talbot is not. 78
What Jones himself says ‘involves simplification and omission’. York and Somerset’s culpability for the hero’s death is ‘not relevant here; it is certainly inconvenient to remember it’. ‘Inconvenient for whom, exactly?’, one might ask . One might also inquire as to why the well-advanced quarrelling amongst the factious nobles in 1 Henry VI is merely embryonic as 2 Henry VI opens. Are these internal divisions, one of the key thematic concerns of 1 Henry VI and the one unifying theme of the three Henry VI plays, also irrelevant at the beginning of 2 Henry VI? By designating a ‘peculiar blend of continuity and discontinuity’ as a distinguishing characteristic of the Henry VI plays, Jones effectively absolves Shakespeare (he considers his sole authorship of the Henry VI plays beyond question)
78
Ibid.
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from all inconsistencies within and between the plays and implies that only those who ‘jump to conclusions’ about the chronology of the plays are troubled by them:
Even if such objections as Dover Wilson’s to the priority of Part One can be shown to be without much substance, it still needs to be asked why so many competent judges seem predisposed to be sceptical about an “intentional trilogy”. It is as if they find something inherently implausible in the notion. 79
His use of conditional constructions is revealing here; Jones provides little of real substance in his attempts to counter Dover Wilson’s objections. The unlikelihood that any playwright, let alone a young pretender, would have conceived an ‘intentional trilogy’ at the end of the sixteenth century has already been discussed above, and Jones adds implausibility to his own argument by noting that the word ‘trilogy’ was not used in Elizabethan English: ‘it seems to be first recorded in the late seventeenth century’. 80 Jones believes that an understanding of the peculiar ‘continuity and discontinuity’ of the Henry VI plays, and evidently their just as peculiar coherence and incoherence, neutralises the arguments of those who doubt the plays are an ‘intentional trilogy’, when really he is only ironing over the plays’ strengths and weaknesses, and like Born, trying to have his cake and eat it too. 81 In developing his case for 2 and 3 Henry VI’s displaying ‘complete ignorance of the drama that ostensibly precedes them’, Dover Wilson makes the following points about the treatment of the plays’ titular monarch:
79
Ibid. p. 138. Ibid. p. 128. The OED finds no usage of ‘trilogy’ in the applicable sense before 1661. 81 Ibid. p. 135. 80
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Part I opens with the funeral of Henry V, who was succeeded, as the chroniclers duly record, by his infant son. But infancy does not suit the dramatist, who needs Henry VI as a character (i.e. for a boy-player) and one old enough to fall in love in the last scene;…a perfectly legitimate departure from history. What does surprise us is to find the writer or writers of 2 and 3 Henry VI three times informing the audience that Henry had been only nine months old when he ascended the throne, a statement repeated again at Richard III, 2. 3. 17. So forgetful of the earlier play, if it was earlier, and so unnecessary, since some phrase about boyhood would have served equally well! 82
Born cites Baldwin who, he believes, had countered this anomaly:
The fact is that arguments here are in different planes. Whatever the represented age of Henry in Part I, that age was dictated by stage presentation. The references in 2 and 3 Henry VI and Richard III are to the actual historical fact, without any consideration to stage presentation. The stage presentation of Part I would have no meaning in their context. 83
Baldwin prefaces his remarks with ‘The fact is…’ in an attempt to confer upon them an air of authority. We have seen how precious little hard evidence exists concerning the chronology of the Henry VI plays and that critics have been only too willing to redress the prevailing uncertainty by presenting their own subjective opinions as objective facts. We have already witnessed Baldwin’s tendency to confuse fact and fiction; here we have a further example. He fails to register that the Henry VI plays and indeed all history plays are entirely ‘stage presentation[s]’ of ‘actual historical fact[s]’. By claiming that the stage presentation of history in 1 Henry VI has ‘no
82 83
Wilson 1952a, p. xii. Born 1974 , p. 327, citing Baldwin 1959, p. 335.
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meaning in’ the represented historical contexts of 2 and 3 Henry VI and Richard III, Baldwin is unwittingly challenging the orthodox position (to which he subscribes) that the plays were planned as a unified tetralogy. By citing only Baldwin and considering his remarks an adequate response to Dover Wilson’s challenge, Born further undermines the credibility of his own hypothesis. The varying portraits of Gloucester in 1 and 2 Henry VI are held up by Dover Wilson as further evidence that 1 Henry VI is the later play. He observes that while in both parts Winchester is ‘much the same disagreeable hustler’ the chroniclers had depicted him as, Gloucester on the other hand ‘appears as two different men’. 84 His typically evocative description of the Gloucesters’ differences is worth quoting in full:
In Part II he is, as Salisbury describes him, “noble gentleman” and the “good Duke Humphrey”, very conscious of his responsibilities and exercising the greatest restraint upon his feelings at moments of extreme provocation, especially in the royal presence, yet prepared to meet his enemy face to face, and let the sword decide between them [II.i], when no other means of settlement seems possible. In Part I, the first act especially, he shows neither dignity nor self-control, but conducts himself like a common brawler, who outbids Winchester in sacrilegious abuse, taxes him now with the attempted murder of Henry V, now with selling licences to brothels, and threatens to toss his reverence in a blanket, tug his beard and drag him up and down by the cheeks. This roaring-boy cannot have been drawn by the man to whom we owe the “noble gentleman” of Part II. Yet whoever drew him had the other portrait in mind, even if he was incapable of appreciating its finer points, inasmuch as his single reference to Gloucester’s duchess [1.1.39] is demonstrably derived, not from the chronicles, but from what he understood about her in 2 Henry VI. 85
84 85
Wilson 1952a, p. xii. Ibid. p. xiii.
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It is evident that in the split personality of Gloucester we have another non sequitur challenging the contention that the Henry VI plays were conceived as a connected trilogy. The sole reference to the Protector’s wife, as Gaw had previously pointed out, would mean little, if anything, to an audience unfamiliar with 2 Henry VI. 86 Gaw compares the portrayals of Winchester in 1 and 2 Henry VI and shows that the dialogue concerning the cardinal in the first scene of 2 Henry VI bears the technical hallmarks of a character being introduced to the audience as new, which would be quite superfluous if the play had followed 1 Henry VI. 87 He also shows how some lines in 1 Henry VI appear to refer to characters pre-established in 2 Henry VI. When Gloucester berates Winchester in the first scene of 1 Henry VI with ‘None do you like, but an effeminate prince / Whom like a school-boy you may over-awe’(35–6), his lines are not tuned to their immediate context—neither Winchester nor Gloucester has yet been brought into contact with an ‘effeminate prince’ (and will not be until 3.1), with Henry V scarcely cold in his coffin and Henry VI being historically only nine months old. Not until 2 Henry VI do we witness Winchester struggling for control of the still ‘protected’ Henry VI. The most logical explanation is that the playwright had the Winchester of 2 Henry VI in mind as he drafted the scene. Gaw concludes his discussion with the following summary:
It is contrary to all likelihood, in the light of the known popularity of harey the vj, that the characters of Gloucester and Winchester in the Contention should, if that play had been written later than harey the vj, have been treated as characters new to the audience,
86 87
Gaw 1926, p. 81. Ibid. pp. 77–8.
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and that the relations between the Protector and the Cardinal should have been so mildly conceived after the fiery quarrels of harey the vj. 88
Attempting to dismiss this evidence by saying ‘the argument cuts both ways’, Born seems unconscious that he grants Dover Wilson’s and Gaw’s position the same legitimacy as his own. He then refers us again to his critic of choice, Baldwin, who has ‘cogently refuted’, Born believes, the arguments above. 89 Returning to the matter later in his article, he stumbles over his own feet with the following remarks:
Surely if Shakespeare had first written Part 2 with Duke Humphrey a spotless hero, he would not have drawn him as a “loud-mouthed brawler” when tagging on Part 1. Is it not far more likely that Shakespeare, following the chronicles, started out with Duke Humphrey as one of the factious noblemen and, as he proceeded in his composition of the play, became aware that he would need him as the unfortunate hero of Part 2? 90
Born is certainly one for imputing what Elizabethan playwrights were and were not aware of. Earlier in this chapter I cited his speculation that Greene attended readings or rehearsals of Shakespeare’s 2 and 3 Henry VI where he ‘could have easily picked up the “Tygers heart” line’. 91 Here he has Shakespeare ‘following the chronicles’ in his treatment of Gloucester in 1 Henry VI and becoming aware as he composed that he would have to have the Protector go through a metamorphosis from ‘roaring-boy’ to ‘noble gentleman’—from inflammatory heckler to tragic hero—between 1 and 2 Henry VI. This changing-horses-in-midstream mode of composition is hardly one we
88
Ibid. pp. 81–2. Born 1974, p. 327; Baldwin 1959, p. 335. Born 1974, p. 329. 91 Ibid. p. 332. 89 90
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Comment [RJM13]: you used the same phrase not so long ago; perhaps “ties himself in knots”, “trips himself up”, “stumbles over his own feet”?
would expect of a man who purportedly planned and conceived the Henry VI plays and Richard III as a unified tetralogy. More tellingly, Shakespeare (and indeed any other writer, except Born, apparently) would have looked in vain in any chronicle for a single description of ‘the good Duke of Gloucester’ as ‘one of the factious noblemen’ of Henry VI’s reign. 92 Once again Born’s conjectural criticism is unconvincing and here actually misleading. In his exhaustive commentary on the Henry VI plays, Dover Wilson identifies many more inconsistencies in addition to the three major chronological ones (the forgotten Talbot, the age of King Henry VI, and the treatment of Gloucester) discussed above. Born’s attempts to refute Dover Wilson have not withstood close scrutiny and yet they went essentially unchallenged for more than twenty years—such was the unquestioning acceptance of the post-Alexander orthodoxy among Shakespeare critics. In such a climate, any inconsistencies in the texts tend to be explained either in the have-one’s-cake-and-eat-it-too fashion observed above, or simply ignored. Thankfully, in the last twenty years a few critics have dared to challenge this orthodoxy and strive for objectivity in their scholarship by leaving no evidential stone unturned. The doubts of old surrounding the genesis of the Henry VI plays are being dusted off and re-examined. Questions are again being asked such as, for example, why 2 Henry VI locates, according to ‘actual historical fact’, Mortimer’s death in Wales (II.ii.41–2), when 1 Henry VI has the same character dying onstage, in the Tower of London, at the close of a long, unhistorical scene (2.5) in which he explains
92 See John Dover Wilson (ed.), The Third Part of King Henry VI (Cambridge: CUP, 1952), Cambridge Shakespeare, at p. xx, n. 3, hereafter cited as ‘Wilson 1952c’ and Edward Halle, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548, repr. 1809), p. 209. Hereafter cited as ‘Halle’.
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to York the genealogy behind his claim to the throne. This discrepancy seems more than worthy of comment. Without denying Shakespeare the right to contradict himself, it seems unlikely that, after he had gone to the trouble of inventing the Tower scene (2.5) for 1 Henry VI, a scene therefore all the more likely to stay in his mind, especially if we accept Born’s hypothesis that all three plays were written between the last months of 1591 and August 1592, he would then alter so drastically his dramatisation of Mortimer’s death in 2 Henry VI. Commentators have also noted that
Comment [RJM14]: It is implausible to suggest that Shakespeare should contradict himself…
the Earl of Cambridge, said at line 88 of the Tower scene to have levied an army against Henry V in the cause of Mortimer, is, in Shakespeare’s Henry V, condemned at Southampton for conspiring to assassinate the king without levying an army (II.ii). It is clear that there is more inconsistency inherent in the Henry VI plays than the ‘absolutists’, for whatever reason, are prepared to acknowledge. One reason no doubt is that Shakespeare is Shakespeare. Samuel Johnson recognised how a writer’s fame can influence the criticism of his works:
The learned world has always admitted the usefulness of critical disquisitions, yet he that attempts to show, however modestly, the failure of a celebrated writer, shall surely irritate his admirers, and incur the imputation of envy, captiousness, and malignity. 93
There are few writers in English as celebrated as Shakespeare, and the identification of faults of any kind in works attributed to him, such as inconsistencies in character and plot, and variations in poetic quality, is a hazardous undertaking. But the passing over of such faults is potentially even more hazardous. Johnson again:
93 W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (eds.), Samuel Johnson, The Rambler in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 17 vols. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1958–), iv, 376.
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Comment [RJM15]: By “most” do you mean the absolutists? If so, perhaps you should say so.
The faults of a writer of acknowledged excellence are more dangerous, because the influence of his example is more extensive; and the interest of learning requires that they should be discovered and stigmatized, before they have the sanction of antiquity conferred upon them, and become precedents of indisputable authority. 94
1.6 Taylor’s Evidence Taylor strengthens the case for 1 Henry VI post-dating 2 and 3 Henry VI by citing the remarkably far-reaching research of Eliot Slater. 95 Throughout the 1970s Slater published a series of investigations into the relationship between rare vocabulary and the compositional sequence of the Shakespeare canon. These studies establish a statistically significant correlation between the recurrence of less frequent lexical items (words that occur fewer than eleven times in the canon) and the demonstrable or probable order of composition. In terms of this rare vocabulary, 1 Henry VI exhibits more links with 3 Henry VI (22 percent above random expectation), than it does with 2 Henry VI (19 percent). The near-contemporary plays that are linked most closely to 1 Henry VI are: Richard III (16 percent); Titus Andronicus (16 percent); and Richard II (15 percent). When the plays’ complete vocabularies are compared, the plays most closely linked to 1 Henry VI are: 3 Henry VI (23 percent); 2 Henry VI (18 percent), Richard III (15 percent); Titus (15 percent); Richard II (15 percent); Two Gentlemen (14 percent). 96 Both tests have 1 Henry VI closer to 3 Henry VI in date of composition than to 2 Henry VI.
94
Ibid. p. 134. Taylor 1995, p. 150, n. 20. Taylor 1995, p. 150. Taylor acknowledges in an endnote that Slater’s tests are ‘reliable here only insofar as they demonstrate that the assumption of common authorship is incompatible with the assumption that Part One was written first’ (n. 21, p. 200). 95 96
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The treatment of historical sources throughout the Henry VI plays is held up by Taylor as further evidence that 1 Henry VI is closer to 3 Henry VI than to 2 Henry VI:
Contention [2 Henry VI] makes no discernible use of Holinshed; Duke of York [3 Henry VI] and Part One—and the rest of Shakespeare’s history plays—demonstrably rely on Holinshed as a major chronicle source. 97
Taylor is guilty of over-simplification here, however. Dover Wilson, who conducted one of the most perceptive investigations into the usage of historical sources for his editions of the Henry VI plays, explained how the major chronicles were connected to each other. Edward Halle’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke was printed in 1548. When Richard Grafton was compiling A Chronicle at Large (printed in 1569), he essentially reprinted Halle’s account, although he ‘often omits passages and occasionally incorporates matter from other sources or adds a sentence or two of his own’.98 In 1577 Raphael Holinshed completed The Chronicles of Englande, Scotlande and Irelande. A second, revised edition appeared in 1587, and because Holinshed also often reproduced Halle, with few important changes, it is difficult to say at any given point in the plays, which of the three, Halle, Grafton or Holinshed, is the actual source. Dover Wilson considers that while Grafton seems to have been the main source for 2 Henry VI and Halle for 3 Henry VI, Holinshed ‘was constantly consulted’ for both. 99 He shows that after Act 1 of 1 Henry VI, ‘there are only occasional passages which echo Holinshed alone’ and
97
Ibid. p. 151. Wilson 1952a, p. xxxii. 99 Wilson 1952c, p. xx. 98
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concludes that the author(s) of the latter acts mainly relied upon Halle or Grafton. 100 As Taylor goes on in his article to argue convincingly for Nashe’s authorship of Act 1, his single-sentence summary of the use of historical sources in the Henry VI plays and how they relate to Shakespeare’s habitual use of them elsewhere is a little misleading. Taylor returns to form, however, when he approaches the use of historical sources from another angle:
Part One treats the historical sources in a manner surprisingly similar to Marlowe’s treatment of his in Tamburlaine II: in both cases, in order to make a play from historical material already exploited in another play or plays, the author was forced to compound materials from widely separated dates, played havoc with anything resembling historical sequence, and simply invented a good deal. Both Geoffrey Bullough and Kenneth Muir recognize that, in terms of treatment of history, Part One drastically violates the Shakespearean norm; but neither notices its resemblance to another play from approximately the same period, which we know was an unanticipated sequel. 101
If, as the evidence discussed above so strongly suggests, the Folio’s 2 and 3 Henry VI were written before 1 Henry VI, the earlier plays must have originally been known by different titles. It seems that 1 Henry VI, in contrast to the other Henry VI plays, was not printed in any form prior to 1623; certainly there is no extant quarto or octavo and no record in the Stationers’ Register. If Alexander’s explanation for the origin of the 1594 quarto of The First Part of The Contention of the two famous
100
Ibid. p. xxxiv. Taylor 1995, p. 151. See Geoffrey Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957–75), iii, 23–41 and Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 24–6.
101
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Houses of Yorke and Lancaster and the 1595 octavo of The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke is correct, the trained memories of those who cobbled those texts together would not have forgotten the titles of the plays they were reconstructing. It was surely crucial for sales that the titles the plays had been known by in the theatre appeared on the printed editions. 102 It is unlikely that the play called The second Part of Henry the Sixt in the Folio was always so named because, as Taylor observes, if the agents behind the 1594 quarto had identified the second part of a play as The First Part of the Contention…they would have bewildered the potential purchasers of the play. There is also a marked similarity between the title of Halle’s chronicle and the full title of the 1594 quarto. The fact that Contention and True Tragedy ran through three editions before the publication of the Folio suggests that the Elizabethan and Jacobean purchasers of Contention and True Tragedy were in no doubt about which plays they were buying. 103
1.7 Thirty Years of Uncertainty From 1 February 1593—the date of the last recorded performance of harey the vj by Strange’s Men—the history of the manuscript used in the first productions of the play went unrecorded for thirty years. During that period any number of authorial or theatrical agents could have made revisions. That the major contemporary editors of the play do not allow for the possibility of revision between 1592 and 1623 is
102 Those critics who argue against Alexander’s classification of Contention and True Tragedy as ‘bad quartos’ and for the plays being genuine Shakespeare—his own earlier versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI—must, of course, agree with Taylor that those plays were originally performed as Contention and True Tragedy. 103 See Paul J. Vincent, ‘No Quarrel, But a Slight Contention: A Bibliographical Analysis of Henry the Sixth, Parts Two and Three’, unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Auckland, 1998, pp. 28–9. Hereafter cited as ‘Vincent 1998’.
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puzzling when the hypothesis that Shakespeare revised some of his plays has gained a much wider acceptance in the last twenty-five years. 104 Randall Martin, the editor of the most recent Oxford edition of 3 Henry VI (2001), argues that True Tragedy was Shakespeare’s first version of the play, probably written in 1591, which has been preserved in the imperfect, reported octavo text of 1595. 3 Henry VI is ‘Shakespeare’s later and considerably longer version of the play’, Martin believes, ‘probably written sometime between 1594 and 1596’. 105 The Arden3 edition of the same play, also published in 2001, similarly allows for the possibility that the Folio text is Shakespeare’s revision of his earlier True Tragedy. 106 Clearly if we have no official record of the whereabouts of the copy behind the Folio 1 Henry VI or its ownership between its first performances and its first printing over thirty years later, then it is unjustifiable to exclude the possibility that at some stage or stages during that time revision—in the form of additions, cuts, or rewritings—could have occurred. Discounting the possibility that harey the vj was later revised certainly avoids further convolutions in the already extremely complex problem of when the play was written. But as Chambers firmly believed, simplifying the problems of the Shakespeare chronology never advances our overall knowledge. The problem of determining if and when revision was carried out on the manuscript behind the first performances of harey the vj in 1592 is inextricably linked to the problem of who owned the play during the thirty years between its last recorded
104
For the most comprehensive recent investigation into Shakespeare’s revision see Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (eds.), The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of ‘King Lear’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 105 Randall Martin (ed.), Henry VI, Part 3 (Oxford: OUP, 2001), Oxford Shakespeare, p. 3. See also his ‘The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and 3 Henry VI: Report and Revision’, RES, 209 (2002), 8–30. 106 John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen, (eds.), King Henry VI, Part 3 (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), Arden Shakespeare Third Series, p. 158.
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performance by Strange’s Men and the publication of the First Folio. In order to link this chapter with the next, which develops a new hypothesis for the degree to which 1 Henry VI can be said to be a revised text, I conclude here with a discussion of the ownership of the play between 1592 and 1623. In The Shakespeare Company 1594–1642, the first complete history of the theatre company created in 1594 as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and known from 1603 as the King’s Men, Andrew Gurr presents a vivid reconstruction of the day to day running of the most famous acting company of the age. 107 He immediately clarifies received notions of play ownership:
Conditioned as we are to start the study of this period with Shakespeare, it is easy to forget that it was not the author but the company that controlled everything to do with his plays. The company bought the play from the author and did with it whatever they pleased. Indeed, apart from the very few plays that survive in manuscript as the “allowed book” licensed for staging, it is likely that most of the play-texts we read are only approximations of the texts the company chose to stage. There is strong evidence that even Shakespeare, himself a company co-owner and a performer of his own scripts, never expected his texts to be transferred to the stage as he wrote them. The company did what it pleased with its scripts, as on more than one occasion Jonson, Webster, and other writers lamented. Every play had its first publication on stage by the company. Printed texts came later and rarely show exactly what playgoers to the Globe or Blackfriars saw and heard. The company was the real author of the 168 plays that have survived from its long reign, but its first publications only survive residually in the printed texts. 108
107 108
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company 1594–1642 (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). Ibid. p. xiv.
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While a book-length study is needed to document the personages and activities of this celebrated company, what we know of Shakespeare’s theatrical allegiances prior to 1594 would not fill the slimmest of monographs. Because comparatively little is known of how the only rival of Shakespeare’s company, the Admiral’s Men, functioned, we cannot say to what extent the companies mirrored each other, let alone how closely they reflected the policies of the companies that existed prior to what Gurr calls elsewhere the ‘Great Divide’ of 1594. 109 Nevertheless it would clearly be a mistake to think that the study of its practices can in no way inform our patchy understanding of the workings of those earlier companies. From exhaustive study of the surviving records, Chambers established that the common practice of Shakespeare’s day was for acting companies to commission plays from a playwright or playwrights, and that once written, the company, not the author(s) retained the ownership and playing rights of the play-book.110 It is most likely then that Strange’s Men owned the ‘book’ of harey the vj in 1592–3 and that the record takings, after Henslowe’s cut had been deducted, went into the company’s coffers, not the author’s—or authors’—pockets. From February 1593 however, the ownership trail goes cold until 8 November 1623, when the Stationers’ Register entered to ‘Mr Blounte’ and ‘Isaak Jaggard’ sixteen plays—including ‘The thirde part of Henry the sixte’, which Chambers considers most likely to be 1 Henry VI—printed in the First Folio for the first time, ‘for their Copie’. 111 The question of when harey the vj ceased to be a Strange’s play and became a Chamberlain’s/King’s Men’s play seems at first easy to answer. Gurr believes that all
109
‘The Great Divide of 1594’ in Brian Boyd (ed.), Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), at pp. 29–48. See Chambers 1930, i., 92–125; Bentley 1971, pp. 62–110. 111 See p. 24 above. 110
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of Shakespeare’s plays were apportioned to the newly formed Chamberlain’s Men in May 1594, and since the last recorded performance of the play in Henslowe’s Diary is dated 1 February 1593, the chronological termini are very narrow. But just what we understand by ‘Shakespeare’s plays’ in 1594 is very problematic. There is no external evidence linking Shakespeare to harey the vj before 1623. Francis Meres omits all three Henry VI plays from a list of twelve plays he attributes to Shakespeare in his Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury, printed in 1598. 112 The hypothesis that Strange’s Men owned neither 2 nor 3 Henry VI between March 1592 and February 1593 is strongly supported by those plays not appearing in Henslowe’s Diary during that period. However divided critics may be over the order of composition of the Henry VI plays, they are unanimous on all three being written before September 1592, and it beggars belief that Strange’s Men would withhold two other new or recent plays on the reign of Henry VI from the stage after the record receipts harey the vj had generated. It seems most likely that another company (or possibly companies) owned 2 and 3 Henry VI prior to 1594 and that no one company owned all three plays before May 1594. The year 1594 then, after 1592 and 1623, is the next most significant year in the chronology of 1 Henry VI. Few contemporary scholars discuss the play in connection with this momentous year in Shakespeare’s theatrical career. The only evidence indicating that the three Henry VI plays were performed together by the same company is found in the epilogue of Shakespeare’s Henry V, first printed in 1600:
Henry the Sixt, in infant bands crown’d King
112
Meres’s Palladis Tamia preserves the earliest catalogue of Shakespeare’s works, which is reproduced in Chambers 1930, ii, 193–4.
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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 the sake, In your fair minds let this acceptance take. (Epi. 9–14)
As the Chorus concludes Shakespeare’s most triumphant English history play, he tempers Henry’s victories by reminding the audience of the disastrous reign of his son, in which France was lost and England wracked by civil war. His words ‘Which oft our stage hath shown’ would seem to testify both to the enduring popularity of the Henry VI plays and to their having been performed on the ‘stage’ of the Chamberlain’s Men. Although we have no record of the plays being performed after 1 February 1593, this testimony, combined with the exceptional popularity of harey the vj and the fact that Contention and True Tragedy ran through three editions before 1623, suggest that the Henry VI plays may well have been revived first in 1594 shortly after the formation of Chamberlain’s Men and later in 1599, the year in which Henry V is usually dated. 113 The orthodox position, that 1 Henry VI was not revised in any way on these and possibly other occasions between 1592 and 1623, finds no support in the conclusion of Bentley’s seminal study, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time 1590–1642. The extant evidence for the revision of plays, though ‘scattered’:
113
The editors of the Oxford Complete Works date Henry V in 1598–9.
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makes it clear that if a play had sufficient theatrical appeal to be kept in the repertory of an Elizabethan, Jacobean, or Caroline acting company, it was normal for the text to be revised for at least one of the revivals.… On the basis of the extant evidence one can safely say that all attached professional dramatists [the category in which Bentley places Shakespeare from 1594] must have been involved in the revision of plays—their own as well as other men’s—for the refurbishing of old plays in the repertory seems to have been the universal practice in the London theatres from 1590 to 1642. As a rough rule of thumb one might say that almost any play first printed more than ten years after composition and known to have been kept in active repertory by the company which owned it is most likely to contain revisions by the author or, in many cases, by another playwright working for the same company. 114
1 Henry VI conforms to Bentley’s criteria: it was first printed over thirty years after its composition and is described by the Chorus of Henry V as having been often shown on ‘our stage’. The best interpretation of the two pieces of external evidence—the entry in Henslowe’s Diary on 3 March 1592 recording exceptionally high receipts from a play Henslowe called harey the vj and Nashe’s description of the crowd-pulling exploits of Talbot published in August of the same year—is that they both describe the play that was eventually printed more than thirty years later as The first Part of Henry the Sixt in the Shakespeare First Folio. As the action of 1 Henry VI almost certainly reflects historical events of 1591–2, both the internal and external evidence points to Henslowe’s harey the vj having been new in the fullest sense and to its having been written between the last months of 1591 and the first two months of 1592. This conclusion best fits the evidence examined thus far, and together with the manifold
114
Bentley 1971, pp. 262–3.
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and exceptional dramaturgical inconsistencies that have been identified between the Henry VI plays, it severely problematises the hypothesis that the plays were written in the order that they appear in the Folio. The weight of evidence considered here tips— or rather jerks—the scales in favour of 1 Henry VI post-dating 2 and 3 Henry VI, and does not endorse to any significant degree the hypothesis that the Henry VI plays were conceived from the first as a trilogy or, if Richard III is included, as a tetralogy. Quite apart from the OED not finding ‘trilogy’ used in the applicable sense before 1661, it is most likely that the three plays were not owned by one acting company between March 1592 and February 1593, and likely that they were not performed together before May 1594. The next chapter examines the structure of the 1623 1 Henry VI in an effort to clarify how much of that text was witnessed by the record-breaking first audiences of harey the vj. If Bentley’s ‘rough rule of thumb’ can be shown to apply to the play, and substantial revisions were made after its original performances, then it will be more accurate to talk of the play’s ‘dates’ rather than its ‘date’. Accordingly, the conclusions reached in this chapter are necessarily preliminary and must be viewed together with those of the ensuing chapters before a fully informed hypothesis for the chronology of 1 Henry VI can be synthesised.
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2 FOUR-PART HARMONY: THE REVISED harey the vj OF FLEAY, GAW, DOVER WILSON, AND MINCOFF
A comprehensive analytical model for attributing Early Modern authorship, one which might be used to clarify Shakespeare’s connection with 1 Henry VI, has evolved only over the last forty years. 1 Consequently, every authorship hypothesis for the play published before (and indeed some after) Gary Taylor’s, which is fully appraised in Chapter 4, relies more on personal opinion and speculation than on impartial assessment of the external and internal evidence. Taylor’s hypothesis is by no means perfect, but it is so much more thorough than those of his major predecessors—F. G. Fleay, Allison Gaw, John Dover Wilson, and Marco Mincoff— that little would be gained from their comparison here. The enduring value of their criticism stems not from their (to varying degrees) subjective attributions of the play to Shakespeare and/or various combinations of his early contemporaries, but from the evidence each presented in support of his conviction that F represents a substantially revised play. As emphasised in the previous chapter, our understanding of when the play was written is inextricably linked to our understanding of who authored it. Clearly the degree to which 1 Henry VI can be said to be a revised or restructured text impacts
1 The evolution of this model can be traced through the contributions to the field made by MacDonald P. Jackson, from ‘Affirmative Particles in Henry VIII’, NQ, 206 (1962), 372–4, to his definitive study on the authorship of Pericles, Defining Shakespeare—‘Pericles’ as Test Case, published in 2003 (cited herein as ‘Jackson 2003’).
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directly on any hypothesis for the play’s authorship and chronology. In ‘Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part One’, Taylor concludes that ‘theories of substantial revision, months or years after the original performances, should no longer be taken seriously’. 2 Taylor not only refuses to take arguments for revision seriously, but he also sees no need for a close structural analysis of 1 Henry VI, relying instead on his impressive bibliographical, linguistic and metrical evidence almost to the exclusion of literary criticism. 3 Once Taylor’s juggernaut of an authorship hypothesis starts rolling, fundamental uncertainties concerning the genesis of the play are crushed beneath it. 4 One major casualty is the uncertainty that persists (and must always do so) about whether all of F was composed in a single, limited period. Taylor courts convenience rather than critical caution and decides that the manuscript behind the harey the vj staged by Strange’s Men at the Rose theatre on 3 March 1592 is preserved unaltered in the 1623 Folio, meaning that:
Part One is the only securely dated play in the early Shakespeare canon—or rather, that II.iv and IV.ii–IV.vii.32 of Part One are the most securely dated passages of early Shakespearean dramatic verse. 5
But Taylor cannot prove that Shakespeare’s work in 1 Henry VI was part of Henslowe’s harey the vj, the play flocked to by so many Londoners in 1592—no one can. We see him employing rhetorical ‘absolutism’ above to support his ‘disintegration’ of 1 Henry VI. Taylor’s argument for the multiple authorship is
2
Taylor 1995 , p. 170. By ‘literary criticism’ I mean the discussion of the play as a dramatic and literary creation: its plot structure, themes, characterisation, and staging. 4 Chapter 4 anatomises this tendency in Taylor’s criticism on the play. 5 Taylor 1995, p. 184. 3
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compelling, but one gains from it little idea of the scene-by-scene and act-by-act composition of the play. 6 This chapter conducts a full structural analysis of 1 Henry VI, which is undeniably integral to any investigation into its genesis. From playwright’s quill to printer’s type, Early Modern play-texts were subject to different kinds of revision by different kinds of revisers. My primary concern here is the structuring and evident restructuring of the play as a dramatic creation rather than a bibliographical one. The revisions discussed here are those which appear to have originated with the dramatist(s) behind 1 Henry VI, not with the book-keepers, compositors, proof-readers, or any other agents who may have revised the text after the manuscript left authorial hands. The following chapter will deal fully with the nature of the manuscript copy used to create F and to what extent agents other than the author(s) can be said to have been revisers of 1 Henry VI. 7
2.1 The Industrious Fleay: a ‘dogmatic pioneer’8 Before the twentieth century, the notion that F presents not only the writing of several playwrights, but chronologically distinct layers as well, was given its fullest expression by Fleay. The man was a phenomenon; in his lifetime (1831–1909) he catalogued thousands of lines of verse from hundreds of plays. 9 From his Herculean
6
Ibid. pp. 148, 153. See Chapter 1, pp. 25–6 above for the editions used in this study when referencing 1 Henry VI and other works by Shakespeare. 8 Gaw 1926, p. 17. 9 See Jackson 2003, pp. 85–6. As Jackson summarises, Fleay ‘“examined, counted, and tabulated” the metrical features of the works of Greene, Peele, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Chapman, Jonson, Dekker, Heywood, Middleton, Marston, Webster, Beaumont, Fletcher, Tourneur, Rowley, Massinger, Ford, Shirley, Randolph, Brome, Glapthorne, Suckling and Davenant (not to mention Dryden, Lee, Tennyson, and Byron); the plays in Hazlitt’s 7
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labours he presented hypotheses for the authorship of many anonymous plays from the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. But the sheer scale of Fleay’s undertakings compromised the integrity of his findings; his figures are often inaccurate and he regularly suppressed unfavourable data. 10 Despite these blots, Fleay’s work does not deserve the critical oblivion that has overtaken it. Since his time metrical tests with clearly outlined parameters and procedures have contributed significantly to our understanding of the Shakespeare canon and chronology and those of his contemporaries. 11 Many of Fleay’s pronouncements have since been dismissed by more rigorous modern scholarship, but with plays linked to Shakespeare, his findings have often been vindicated. 12 To the difficult case of 1 Henry VI Fleay devoted a particularly full treatment. In his 1886 Chronicle History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare, he announces his hypothesis that the play acted on 3 March 1592 at the Rose theatre, recorded in Philip Henslowe’s Diary as harey the vj, was Shakespeare’s revamping of an old play written about 1588–9 for the Queen’s Men by four dramatists headed by Marlowe. 13 Using a combination of pioneering bibliographical analysis, metrical tests and stylistic impressions, he concluded that the collaborators were (A) Christopher Marlowe, (B) Robert Greene or Thomas Kyd, (C) George Peele, and (D) Thomas Lodge. The scenes marked in the traditional division as 4.2–7 (the Bordeaux sequence
revision of Dodsley’s Old English Plays, the Shakspere Society’s publications, and Simpson’s School of Shakespeare; besides “such unreprinted plays as I could get access to in original editions”’. 10 See Jackson 2003, p. 85 11 See especially Philip W. Timberlake, The Feminine Ending in English Blank Verse (Menasha: Banta, 1931), hereafter cited as ‘Timberlake 1931’ and Ants Oras, Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: An Experiment in Prosody (Gainesville, Fla: University of Florida Press, 1960), hereafter cited as ‘Oras 1960’. 12 See Jackson 2003, p. 85. 13 F. G. Fleay, Chronicle History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare (London: J. C. Nimmo, 1886), p. 260, then pp. 259–63. Hereafter cited as ‘Fleay 1886’.
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culminating in the Talbots’ death) ‘did not form part of the original play’. 14 Their subject matter, he believed, is more in line and more contemporary with what he regarded as the next play in the series, 2 Henry VI. In his judgement, these scenes were dramatically and poetically superior to their surroundings; a judgement he felt was supported by the fact that in F the scenes form the latter part Actus Quartus, Scena Prima, which has no scene divisions:
It is plain that they were written subsequently to the rest of the play and were 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 take it for granted that this play in its original shape was acted before 2 Henry VI, the commencement of which was evidently meant to fit on the end of the preceding play. It is in accordance with the hypothesis here announced that we find Nashe in his Piers Penniless…referring only to the Talbot scenes as new. 15
Fleay was a master of dogmatic scholarship: ‘It is plain,’ he announces; ‘I take it for granted,’ he declares. He manipulates Thomas Nashe’s 1592 testimony, telling us that he refers ‘only to the Talbot scenes as new,’ when he ought to say ‘only to the Talbot scenes’. Nashe does not refer to any scenes as ‘new’ and when he talks of a Talbot who ‘triumphs again on the stage’, he is surely referring to the scenes in which the hero actually defeats the French in the three acts before the commencement of his death sequence. 16 In 1891 Fleay argued further that the insertion of these scenes, ‘and
14
Ibid. pp. 259–63. Ibid. 16 See Chapter 1, p. 35 above. 15
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the consequent omission of matter to make room for them, produce an extremely short fifth act’. 17 In his Chronicle History, Fleay sought to flesh out his case by enlisting the support of ‘Greene’s’ Groatsworth:
It [1 Henry VI] was…in action when Greene’s celebrated address to those gentlemen, “his quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits making plays,” was written…Greene was evidently addressing the principal playwrights of the time, and, if my present view is a true one, he seized the opportunity of Shakespeare’s having made “new additions” to a play in which all of them had been concerned to endeavour to create an ill-feeling between the “upstart crow beautified with our feathers” and those of the University men, who had hitherto enjoyed a monopoly of writing for the stage, or nearly so…In Greene’s excuse it must be considered how galling it must have been to a man in poverty and bad health to see a play which, while he was connected with it, had attracted little notice, suddenly raised to the highest success by the insertion of a few scenes written by a “Johannes Factotum,” a “Shakescene,” who was “able to bombast out a blank verse” without being “Magister in artibus utriusque universitatis.”…The scene ii.4 has long been recognized as so far superior to the rest of the play as to be probably due to the hand of Shakespeare at a later date, c. 1597–8. 18
Fleay’s assertion that the original 1 Henry VI ‘had attracted little notice’ before Shakespeare added the Talbot death sequence (4.2–7) for Strange’s Men in 1592 is pure conjecture. There is no record of any transaction between acting companies involving 1 Henry VI, nor is there any record of a play on the reign of Henry VI
17
Fleay, A Biographical Chronicle of English Drama, 1559–1642, 2 vols. (London: Reeves and Turner, 1891), ii, 201. 18 Fleay 1886, pp. 259–63.
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having been performed before 1592. 19 One of Fleay’s firmest convictions was that Shakespeare had had nothing to do with the original composition of the play. To ‘prove’ this, he invented the scenarios cited above: the completely unfounded selling of a 1588–9 Queen’s Men play to Strange’s Men in 1591–2, and the slanted reading of Nashe’s testimony to fit his own belief that the Talbot death scenes were so superior to the rest of the play that Shakespeare must have been responsible for them in 1592. I have not had to dig very deep to reveal that Fleay repeatedly doctored the external evidence to fit his own hypothesis. Fleay’s concocted chronology reinforced the widely-held opinion of his contemporaries that Henslowe’s harey the vj of 1592 was Shakespeare’s revision of an early draft by other hands. However, his authorship model for the original play was greeted with expressions of considerable doubt, and his precise identification of a fourfold collaboration was for many years largely ignored. The years between the hypotheses of Fleay and Gaw are characterised by a steady flow of watered-down divisions of authorship which were based on opinion and were in no way derived from a close examination of F. 20 Tucker Brooke begs to differ about the dating of Shakespeare’s revision of the original play in his 1918 Yale edition:
The only fair inference…from the facts known is that the play of Harry the Sixth, dealing largely with Talbot’s wars in France, was composed about the beginning of the year 1592, and that this was later remodeled by Shakespeare into 1 Henry VI. 21
19 Gaw clarifies further that ‘with the exception of the single performance of 2 Seven Deadly Sins on March 6 [1592], Strange’s Men were acting no other play concerning Henry VI or Talbot between February 19, 1592, and February 1, 1593’ (Gaw 1926, p. 6). 20 See the summary of the criticism published on the play between 1886 and 1926 in Gaw 1926, pp. 14–7. 21 C. F. Tucker Brooke (ed.), The First Part of King Henry VI (New Haven: Yale UP, 1918), Yale Shakespeare, p. 134. Hereafter cited as ‘Brooke 1918’.
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Wherever Shakespeare is associated with 1 Henry VI in the criticism published between Fleay and Gaw, it is almost always as a reviser of an old play by other playwrights. Tucker Brooke’s ‘only fair inference’ that Shakespeare carried out his revisions after 1592 was novel and struck a chord with Gaw’s impressions of the play, which are discussed below.
2.2 A Swift Eclipse: Gaw’s Origin and Development When Allison Gaw completed his book-length and lengthily-titled study The Origin and Development of ‘1 Henry VI’ in Relation to Shakespeare, Marlowe, Peele, and Greene in 1926, he could never have foreseen that his hypothesis would be completely discounted within three years. The six years he had spent on the project had been, as far as the succeeding critical orthodoxy was concerned, completely in vain. His magnum opus swiftly became a white elephant with the publication of Peter Alexander’s Shakespeare’s ‘Henry VI’ and ‘Richard III’ in 1929. Hundreds of years of doubts, denials, dissertations, and a study as full and recent as Gaw’s fell into an obscurity so profound and enduring that most contemporary critics regard the authorship of 1 Henry VI as a closed case. Today Gaw’s work can be seen as a fulcrum for the seesaw of opinions on the play’s genesis down the centuries. He surveyed the work of previous scholars and synthesised a new hypothesis that, he believed, perfectly solved the twin problems of the play’s date and authorship. By the end of Origin and Development he has turned the play into one ‘written by numbers’: the authorship of every single line is accounted for, divided between Marlowe, Peele, Shakespeare, and the unknown 87
playwrights ‘B’ and ‘C’. The journey that ends in this decipherment takes many twists and turns. Gaw’s logic is often confused and he is even guilty of self-contradiction at one point, but upon publication his study nevertheless superseded Fleay’s as the most comprehensive investigation into the genesis of 1 Henry VI. 22 So swift and total was the eclipse of Origin and Development that few scholars today are aware of its existence. Like that of Fleay, Gaw’s work has been languishing in oblivion for decades, a fate that, however suspect his attribution methodology was, it does not deserve. I maintain that just as some of Fleay’s authorship tests have informed modern attribution techniques, so some of Gaw’s evidence for revision in F can inform a more rigorous modern investigation into the genesis of 1 Henry VI. In Origin and Development Gaw concludes that the ‘original organization’ of Henslowe’s harey the vj—performed for the first time by Strange’s Men at the Rose theatre on 3 March 1592—had been subsequently re-organised by Shakespeare not once, but twice. Shakespeare, he argued, was not connected with the play in any way before June 1594. 23 The only other critic to examine the structure of 1 Henry VI with the thoroughness of Gaw has been Mincoff, who in both ‘The Composition of Henry VI, Part I’ (1965) and Shakespeare, The First Steps (1976) argues that the play is all Shakespearean and that F represents a substantially revised play. 24 Before evaluating their respective evidence for revision, I present an outline of the general structure of
22 Gaw opens his case for Marlowe having plotted and written half of harey the vj with a listing of the similarities in diction, characterisation and dramaturgy he finds between the play and the rest of the Marlowe canon (pp. 72– 98). But later on in his authorship chapter we find him distancing his own study from those that list ‘word-clues’ as evidence of common authorship. He denies the validity of this method of attribution because ‘the use of such evidence here would require the publication of a minute classification and analysis of several hundred parallels from a number of other authors’ (pp. 124–5, n. 33). He seems oblivious to the fact that he had conspicuously failed to ‘refrain from the use of any material of this nature’ earlier in his study. 23 See Gaw 1926, pp. 146–157. Shakespeare carried out his first revision, Gaw believed, not later than 1594, while the second, ‘chief’ revision took place in 1599 or later. 24 Marco Mincoff, ‘The Composition of Henry VI, Part I’, SQ 16 (1965), 279–87, hereafter cited as ‘Mincoff 1965’, and Shakespeare, The First Steps (Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1976), hereafter cited as ‘Mincoff 1976’.
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the play drawn from the work of both critics and summarise the main plot elements. Mincoff showed no awareness of his predecessor’s analysis in his own criticism but my comparison of how the two critics—whose opinions on the play’s authorship are diametrically opposed—analysed the structure of 1 Henry VI reveals a surprising degree of correlation.
2.3 The General Structure of 1 Henry VI The play contains three main plot elements; the first and most integral concerns the English hero, Talbot, and his battles against the French, who come to be led by Joan of Arc. The second concerns the quarrelling of the Bishop of Winchester and the Protector, the Duke of Gloucester, over the control of the child King, Henry VI. 25 The origins of the enmity between the Duke of York and the Duke of Somerset are dramatised in the third plot element. Talbot’s story has introduction (1.1–4), rise (his exploits in France: 1.5–6, 2.1– 3), climax (made Earl of Shrewsbury in Paris, where he denounces his foil, the cowardly Sir John Fastolf: 3.4, 4.1), catastrophic fall, and formal eulogy (4.2–7). There is no doubt that up until the end of Act 4, Talbot ‘is the backbone of the play’.26 The first plot element continues into Act 5, however, as Talbot’s opponent Joan is shown surrounded by her fiends in 5.3 and then captured and condemned to burn at the stake in 5.4. Out of the twenty-seven scenes in the traditional division of the play, eighteen are concerned with the Talbot/Joan opposition of the first plot element.
25 26
The confusion in F over the timing of Winchester’s promotion to the rank of cardinal is fully examined below. Gaw 1926, p. 23.
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The feud between Winchester and Gloucester also extends throughout the play but is portrayed and developed in only five scenes. Bishop and Protector start quarrelling at the funeral of Henry V in 1.1 and then fight for control of the Tower in 1.3. In 3.1 Gloucester publicly accuses Winchester before the King. Ostensibly reconciled, both advise the King to make peace with France in 5.1, and peace is actually concluded by Winchester in 5.4. The third main element, that dramatising the beginning of the rivalry between York and Somerset, starts as late as 2.4, the Rose Plucking scene. It continues into 2.5 in which Mortimer dies in the Tower after relating Richard Plantagenet’s claim to the throne, and then into 3.4 and 4.1, which depict the quarrels of Vernon and Basset, followers of York and Somerset respectively. This third plot thread is then entwined with the first in 4.3 and 4.4, in which Talbot is left at the mercy of the French as a direct result of the enmity between York and Somerset. Oddly, Act 5 makes no mention of that enmity; York (we hear no more of Somerset) is assigned the role historically played by Bedford as judge of Joan, and is present at the conclusion of peace in 5.4. The third plot element is played out over just six scenes. A fourth, very minor plot thread is introduced in two scenes of Act 5. In 5.3 the Earl of Suffolk, who before then only speaks some eleven lines in 2.4, materialises in France and woos Margaret of Anjou for the young King. Back in England in 5.5, the last scene of the play, Suffolk persuades Henry to break his betrothal to the daughter of the Earl of Armagnac, a match arranged by the Protector Gloucester, and to marry Margaret instead. For Gaw, the dominance and the trajectory of the Talbot story argued strongly against Fleay’s belief that the Bordeaux sequence (4.2–7) was not part of the original play and that Shakespeare added them in 1592, three or four years after its 90
composition. The scenes form a natural conclusion to the hero’s story, and are deliberately placed before the execution of his arch-enemy, Joan of Arc—contrary to the historical sequence—for maximum dramatic effect. The way in which the play reconstructs chronicle history has been much discussed. ‘Commentators have been more or less troubled by the fact that the historical events in the play are considerably disordered’, writes Gaw, and both Geoffrey Bullough and Kenneth Muir recognise that 1 Henry VI treats history very differently from the Shakespearean norm. 27 In his 1976 study Shakespeare, The First Steps Mincoff points out that the play organises the chronicle material to fit two overarching structural patterns. 28 The whole story of the French wars, he notes, is organised around that of Joan of Arc, which occupied no more than two of the thirty years the play dramatises, but which was nevertheless the most picturesque episode of the Hundred Years War. The second pattern, and the one that clinches the issue in favour of the events depicted in 4.2–7 being integral to the play’s original structure, is the sequential deaths of the English leaders:
One by one, first Salisbury, then Bedford, and lastly Talbot, are killed off, leaving a new generation of men without patriotism, without stamina, with no sense of duty to their country. And these deaths are given in careful gradation, and Bedford’s in particular has been romantically expanded to bring out the pattern. 29
Gaw provides two cogent explanations for why the historical material was wrenched about to such a degree:
27
See Chapter 1, p. 71, n. 101 above. Mincoff 1976, pp. 18–9. 29 Ibid. p. 19. 28
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First, the necessary dramaturgic emphasis on the patriot-hero demands that he be created Earl and publicly denounce Fastolfe on the occurrence that dramatically marks the climax of his endeavours, the crowning of his King in the capital of the invaded country; and his death is advanced by nearly quarter of a century because, emotionally, if not in stated terms, this prepares for the burning at the stake of his opponent and motivates the final coming of peace. Second, it appears to have entirely escaped the attention of commentators that many of the chronological difficulties have their origin in the fact that the part of the King had throughout to be played by a child actor. 30
Here we see Gaw at his best: he identifies two fundamental reconfigurations of history around which the playwright(s), at the earliest stage of composition, appear(s) to have structured the play. The integral nature of the Talbot story has been illustrated above; the decision to have a boy actor play the role of the King is equally Comment [p16]:
fundamental, and apparently unique. 31 The editors of both the New Cambridge and the Arden3 1 Henry VI agree that a boy actor originally played the role of Henry VI, but fail to identify the major structural inconsistencies brought about by the introduction of the very subordinate plot thread concerning Margaret of Anjou in 5.3 and 5.5. The next section focuses on the apparent emergence of two Henries and two endings in the final act of 1 Henry VI.
2.4 One Ending or Two?
30 Gaw 1926, pp. 25–6. Henry does not appear until 3.1, in which he refers to his ‘tender years’(71); later in the same scene Warwick asks Winchester ‘What, shall a child instruct you what to do?’(133). At 4.1.149 Henry again refers to his ‘tender years’ and Exeter closes the scene with a soliloquy which includes the line ‘’Tis much when sceptres are in children’s hands’(192). As late as 5.1 the King responds to Gloucester’s suggestion that he marry with: ‘Marriage, uncle? Alas, my years are young; / And fitter is my study and my books / Than wanton dalliance with a paramour.’(21–3). 31 See Chapter 1, p. 56, n. 68 above.
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After telling Gloucester in the first scene of Act 5 that his young years are more suited to study than ‘wanton dalliance with a paramour’(23), Henry utters resignedly:
Yet call th’ambassadors, and, as you please, So let them have their answers every one: [Exit Attendant] I shall be content with any choice Tends to God’s glory and my Country’s weal. (5.1.24–7)
The Protector duly decides for the King and informs the Earl of Armagnac’s ambassador of the acceptance of the Earl’s proposal: Henry will marry the Earl’s daughter. The King then gifts his bride-to-be a jewel, calling it a ‘pledge of my affection’(47); wishes the ambassadors bon voyage, and exits after line 50. He does not reappear until the last scene of the play. The first scene of Act 5 methodically concludes the war plot in a way consistent with both the play’s structural design and with the role of the King being played by a boy actor. From his first appearance in 3.1, Henry has repeatedly drawn attention to his youth and spoken nothing but pious patriotism; his behaviour in 5.1 is therefore completely in character. His restated youth and piety utterly preclude thoughts of amorous love; he will only marry for the greater glory of God and the security of his realm. In 1435, when the peace that 5.1 dramatises was negotiated at Arras, the historical Henry was only thirteen, an age consistent with his characterisation up to this point. But the Margaret plot thread, introduced at the last minute in 5.3 and 5.5, depicts events that took place nine years later and presents the audience with a very different Henry.
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When the King steps back onto the stage in the last scene of the play, his character has completely changed—he no longer talks of study, God, or his realm, but of exactly what he had pledged to deny himself in 5.1: ‘wanton dalliance with a paramour’. Suffolk, who until now has not said a word to the King, has bewitched him with his description of Margaret’s beauty. In 5.1 even Iago would have found it impossible to ‘breed love’s settled passions’(4) in the heart of the King, given that Henry elevates ‘God’s glory and [his] country’s weal’ over his objection to marriage and yields completely to his Protector’s will, but the King of 5.5 is so overwhelmed with passion for the unseen Margaret that he can think of nothing but her and actually instructs Gloucester to ‘give consent / That Margaret may be England’s queen’(24–5). The play’s original conception of Henry—of his age and his character—is thoroughly revised in Act 5 in a way that obscures the structural integrity of the play as it appears to have been originally conceived. With this exposition in mind, we now turn to Gaw’s contention that ‘there are a number of clear indications that the present ending of the drama is an addition to the original play’. 32 Nobody disputes that the ending of 1 Henry VI is obviously designed to anticipate the opening of 2 Henry VI. But if the Henry VI plays were composed in the order they were printed in the Folio, the present ending of 1 Henry VI would surely have confused the original audiences. If we remove the Suffolk/Margaret plot thread, which is not introduced until 5.3.45, Act 5 brings the three main plot lines to a satisfying resolution, and the play’s structure, so harshly criticised by most scholars before Alexander, is seen to be comparatively harmonious, as Gaw shows:
32
Gaw 1926, p. 26–7.
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At the end of V, iv, Talbot is dead, Joan is completely discredited in English eyes and has been sent to the stake, peace is concluded and Henry’s marriage to the daughter of the Earl of Armagnac has been determined on in V, i. Here, except for the new complication in V, iiib, we have a fairly stable conclusion, and the ending of the scene, although not elaborate, is one fairly grateful to English patriotic sentiment.
Yor[k] [addressing the French King]. Then sweare Allegeance to his Maiesty, As thou art Knight, never to disobey, Nor be Rebellious to the Crowne of England, Thou nor thy Nobles, to the Crowne of England. So, now dismisse your Army when ye please: Hang vp your Ensigns, let your Drummes be still, For heere we entertaine a solemne peace. Exeunt
This is logically and aesthetically the end of the play. 33
York’s speech is certainly conclusive in content and tone. The two main plot elements—the Talbot/Joan opposition and the Winchester/Gloucester feuding—so carefully introduced in the very first scene have at this point reached termini entirely consistent with the play’s rearrangement of history. The third plot element, the York/Somerset enmity, has been carefully inter-linked with the two main ones. Firstly, the restoration of Richard Plantagenet to his rank arises from the King’s satisfaction at the Winchester/Gloucester reconciliation (3.1), while later Somerset, through his hatred of York, is responsible for the death of Talbot (4.4). Finally, York
33
Ibid. pp. 27–8
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is made the judge of Talbot’s arch-enemy, Joan, and, as regent, seals the peace treaty between England and France. Ending at 5.4 would have made harey the vj a completely self-contained play, which, had it been written before the other plays on Henry’s reign, would have followed the precedent of the first two-part play, Tamburlaine the Great. As both Gaw and Taylor have observed, second parts appear to have developed as an afterthought from the spectacular success of a particular play rather than being planned in advance. 34 But the ending of 1 Henry VI incontestably anticipates the beginning of 2 Henry VI; scenes 5.3.45–195 and 5.5 are obviously intended to lay the groundwork for it. They are clearly a to-be-continued-in-the-next-instalment device and, as Gaw remarks, they ‘can have no function in the play until its natural sequent, 2 Henry VI, becomes part of the series’. 35 As documented in the previous chapter, we know from Henslowe’s Diary that harey the vj was indeed presented as an isolated play by Strange’s Men at the Rose theatre in 1592–3. There is no indication in the Diary that 2 or 3 Henry VI were in Strange’s repertoire during that time. Gaw is therefore able to refute another foundation of Fleay’s hypothesis: that 1 and 2 Henry VI were written in the Folio order for the same company:
So soon, however, as we admit the possibility that the two plays were originally separate compositions for different companies, and see that 1 Henry VI has another completely natural ending, we perceive also that the false ending of Part 1 must be the result of an attempted adjustment to the dramaturgically correct opening of Part 2 at a time after Part 2 had become the property of the owners of Part 1. 36
34
See Chapter 1, p. 53, n. 65 above. Gaw 1926, p. 29. 36 Ibid. 35
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Or, as we have already established as the most likely scenario in Chapter 1, harey the vj post-dates 2 and 3 Henry VI in composition, which were both written for a company other than Strange’s. Mincoff finds parts of the concluding section of the play, especially the capture of Margaret (5.3.45–195), ‘quite remarkable in their woodenness’. 37 Indeed the use of the ‘aside’ in 5.3 is singularly ridiculous, as is Gaw’s belief that its employment here closely resembles Act IV, scene iii of Love’s Labour’s Lost. 38 In performance (and indeed on the page) the absurdity of having Margaret overhear and attempt to break in upon eight successive ‘asides’ by Suffolk—asides which reveal his own amorous designs on her, no less—and then having Margaret employ three ‘asides’ herself, similarly interrupted by Suffolk, is, as Gaw remarks, ‘too patent for comment’. 39 In Love’s Labour’s Lost the limits of the aside convention are forced with brilliantly self-aware artistry in order to emphasise the absurdities of the lords’ ‘soliloquies’. In terms of the quality of their dramaturgy, poetry, and verbal wit, the two scenes are polar opposites. The inconsistencies caused by the eleventh-hour introduction of the Suffolk/Margaret plot thread are considerable. There is, however, compelling evidence in F that, contrary to Gaw’s conclusion, Suffolk did woo Margaret in the original performances of harey the vj in 1592. We find it in a multi-faceted parallel between the Countess scene (2.3)—which Mincoff rightly thinks belongs to the earliest stratum of the play (see below, p. 112)—and the capture of Margaret (5.3.45–
37
Mincoff 1976, p. 84. Gaw 1926, p. 30. 39 Ibid. p. 31. 38
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195), which Gaw concludes was written ‘about 1594’.40 The thwarted capture of Talbot by the Countess of Auvergne echoes the dramaturgy, diction and prosody of the ‘easy-held imprisonment’(5.3.139) of Margaret by Suffolk:
COUNTESS If thou be he, then art thou prisoner. TALBOT Prisoner! To whom? COUNTESS
To me, bloodthirsty lord,
And for that cause I trained thee to my house. (2.3.32–4) SUFFOLK …See, Reignier, see, thy daughter prisoner! REIGNIER To whom? SUFFOLK REIGNIER
To me. Suffolk, what remedy? I am a soldier and unapt to weep… (5.3.131–3)
In addition to the dramaturgical correspondences, and the use of split verse lines which is rare in the play, there is a telling duplication of phrasing and vocabulary in the immediate surrounds of the two exchanges. 41 At 2.3.26 Talbot politely excuses himself with ‘But since your ladyship is not at leisure…’, while Margaret asks Suffolk at 5.3.97 ‘Are you not at leisure?’. The word ‘captivate’ (which, according to Dover Wilson, is common in Greene but rare elsewhere) appears at 2.3.41 and again at 5.3.107. 42
40
Gaw 1926, pp. 148, 157. This parallel is discussed further in section 10 of Chapter 4 below. 42 Wilson 1952a, p. 143. 41
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The most logical explanation for such a complex of mirrorings is that these two ‘captures’ in 1 Henry VI were conceived and executed by the same playwright and that they were written during the same period. Gaw’s authorship hypothesis states that the anonymous playwright ‘B’ wrote 2.3 and that Shakespeare wrote 5.3.45–195. 43 It would seem more likely that the original structural conception of harey the vj always included these two, deliberately complementary episodes, and that Gaw’s conception of the structure of 1 Henry VI and its relation to 2 and 3 Henry VI is inaccurate. His argument for F preserving two endings, and for the Suffolk/Margaret plot element not having been part of harey the vj certainly sounds persuasive; but it is in direct conflict with the internal evidence. Henslowe’s harey the vj was in all probability written after the other Henry VI plays, which were not performed by Strange’s Men at the Rose between 3 March 1592 and 1 February 1593. It is undeniable that the Suffolk/Margaret plot element would have pointlessly teased and even confused the original audiences unless 2 Henry VI was also in Strange’s repertoire or—and Gaw does not recognise this second possibility—unless 2 and/or 3 Henry VI were being played by another company, in another theatre, in the same season. If, as Gaw concluded, the Suffolk/Margaret plot element was added only once a single company owned all the Henry VI plays, which did not occur, he believed, before the autumn of 1593, then whoever wrote it must have had access to the manuscripts of all three plays. 44 But the existence of two inter-play inconsistencies identified by C. A. Greer discounts this reconstruction. 45 First, nothing is said in the explicit instructions Henry gives Suffolk in 1 Henry VI (5.5.79–101) to the effect that
43
Gaw 1926, p. 159. Ibid. pp. 156–7. 45 C. A. Greer, ‘Revision and Adaptation in 1 Henry VI’, Studies in English, 22 (1942), 110–20, at p. 113. 44
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the latter is to marry Margaret by proxy, yet upon his return with Margaret in 2 Henry VI, he has done exactly that with the apparent approval of the King (I.i.1–16). Second, in 1 Henry VI the King himself proposes that Suffolk get a ‘tenth’ for matching him with Margaret (5.5.92–3), but in 2 Henry VI it is Suffolk who demands instead a ‘whole fifteenth’ (I.i.133) for playing matchmaker. It should be clear to anyone who sees or reads 1 and 2 Henry VI in quick succession that the character of the pastoral Margaret in 5.3 of 1 Henry VI is completely alien to that of the ‘She-wolf of France’ of 2 and 3 Henry VI. As early as I.iii in 2 Henry VI Margaret is plotting with Suffolk to ‘weed’ out Gloucester, Winchester, Somerset, Buckingham, York and the Duchess of Gloucester—her Machiavellian nature, of all the characters in the first ‘tetralogy’, most closely resembles that of Richard III. Suffolk’s character is also discontinuous; at the very end of 1 Henry VI he declares his intentions to rule Margaret, the King, and the realm, whereas early in 2 Henry VI he tells Margaret with unmistakable sincerity that ‘one by one, we’ll weed them all at last, / And you yourself shall steer the happy helm’ (I.iii.99–100). Indeed the illicit and passionate love between the couple is one of the major plot elements of 2 Henry VI. The playwright who conceived the Suffolk and Margaret of 1 Henry VI could hardly have had 2 Henry VI before him. We can therefore provisionally conclude that the Suffolk/Margaret plot element was part of the first performances of harey the vj. Having reached the end or ends of 1 Henry VI, let us return to the very beginning of the play, a close analysis of which reveals the co-existence of different structural conceptions in F.
2.5 Act 1 vs. Acts 2–5 100
The first speech of 1 Henry VI was excoriated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge for the poor quality of its verse, but clearly much thought went into the composition of the opening scene. 46 Coleridge’s disgust is so sensationally expressed that one can easily forget that it is directed solely at the prosody of the play’s opening seven lines and not at any other aspect of the first scene. In singing the praises of 1.1 Gaw is not always on key, but he does remind us that there is more to the scene than seven inept lines of iambic pentameter:
[1.1] is a studied preparation for the various elements in the ensuing play, combining with the outbreak of the Gloucester-Winchester dispute a vivid relation of the capture by the French of the heroic Talbot together with an adroit hint [ll. 25–7] foreshadowing the sorcery of Joan of Arc. It shows a realization of the power of detailed climax found, I believe, nowhere as in Marlowe among the pre-Shakespeareans. 47
If we disregard the eleventh-hour introduction of the Suffolk/Margaret plot element, the scene functions like a microcosm of the whole play. It begins the same way as it ends: with speeches parallel in structure from each of the four Dukes attending the funeral of Henry V. The accounts of three messengers who arrive in succession then interrupt the bickering of the mourners with reports of the loss of French cities and the capture of Talbot. This device is adopted from Senecan tragedy, and the messengers function as a chorus which gradually informs both the English nobles and the audience of the full extent of the disastrous tidings from France.
46 47
See subsection 6.4 of Chapter 4 for a discussion of Coleridge’s remarks. Gaw 1926, p. 88.
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As Gaw noted, the first messenger seems to forecast the nature of the peace agreed to in 5.4 (the ‘first ending’ above) in lines 70–82. The France the English will fight for in the first three acts of the play—the cities of Orléans, Rouen, and Paris, in the last of which Henry is to be crowned in 4.1—are, according to the first messenger already ‘all quite lost’(61). The third messenger describes events which are to be specifically enacted in Acts 2 and 3. In ‘The Episodes in Shakespeare’s I Henry VI’ (1900) John Bell Henneman explores this evident doubling, and quotes and analyses the third messenger’s account of Sir John Fastolf’s cowardice:
…valiant Talbot, above human thought, Enacted wonders with his sword and lance. Hundreds he sent to hell, and none durst stand him; Here, there, and everywhere, enraged he slew. The French exclaimed the devil was in arms: All the whole army stood agazed on him. His soldiers, spying his undaunted spirit, ‘A Talbot! A Talbot!’ cried out amain And rushed into the bowels of the battle. Here had the conquest fully been sealed up, If Sir John Fastolf had not played the coward. He, being in the vaward, placed behind With purpose to relieve and follow them, Cowardly fled, not having struck one stroke. (1.1.121–134)
This is reported as having occurred upon “Retiring from the siege of Orleans”[111]. Now Scene I. of the following Act is laid “before Orleans.” In close agreement with Holinshed and Hall, the stage directions read: “Cry: ‘St. George,’ ‘A Talbot.’ The French
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leap over the walls in their shirts;” and the Bastard of Orleans comments: “I think this Talbot be a fiend of hell” (II. i. 38–46)…The scene in Act II. seems to be the older, upon which is based the Messenger episode. The account of the Messenger is written for the special purpose of introducing the play, and the two versions are allowed to stand side by side in succeeding Acts. 48
The accounts of conflict in and around Orléans themselves conflict; despite their similarities in incident and diction, they are very different dramatisations of the same source material and ‘side by side’ the second depicts on stage what the first describes as having occurred on ‘The tenth of August last’(110). The first scene of the play, so methodically structured in itself, is seen to cause structural complications with the first scene of Act 2. Henneman considers 1.1 a revision of 2.1. Writing seventy-six years later, Mincoff observed that 3.1 is in many ways a repetition of 1.3. In both scenes Winchester and Gloucester quarrel, their followers riot, and the Lord Mayor has to intervene in person to restore calm. Interestingly, although he states that ‘artistically the repetition can be justified and there is indeed a back-reference to the earlier scene at III i’, Mincoff concludes that 1.3 ‘must have been intended for deletion’. 49 His basis for this striking judgement is the discrepancy over Winchester’s rank between the scenes, the most glaring dramaturgical inconsistency in F. In 1.3, Winchester is clearly a cardinal but, in Acts 3 and 4 he is addressed as a bishop. In 5.1 Exeter exclaims:
What! Is my Lord of Winchester installed,
48 John Bell Henneman, ‘The Episodes in Shakespeare’s I. Henry VI’, PMLA, 15 (1900), 290–320, at pp. 298–9. Hereafter cited as ‘Henneman 1900’. 49 Mincoff 1976, p. 21.
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And called unto a cardinal’s degree? (28–9)
That the promotion has only just been negotiated is proved by Winchester being seen to pay a papal legate for his newly acquired robes at ll. 51–5. Mincoff concludes that 1.3 was printed by mistake, even though it is ‘more vivid (though more naïve)’ than 3.1, and well placed structurally between Joan’s arrival at the French court and the death of Salisbury. 50 Instead of a scene in Act 1 revising a scene in a later act—which we have seen Henneman advocating above— Mincoff holds that a scene in Act 1 was itself revised by a scene in a later act. Gaw argues that the discrepancy over Winchester’s rank in 1.3 and 3.1 reveals that one of Marlowe’s collaborators had convinced him that it was more dramatically effective to make Winchester a cardinal in 1.3 rather than in 5.1, which was, apparently, Marlowe’s original intention. Henneman and Gaw are therefore in agreement over the direction of the revision between Act 1 and the rest of the play. In his edition of the play, Dover Wilson considers the confusion proof ‘beyond question’ that two different authors (neither of whom was Shakespeare) were responsible for 1.3 and 3.1. Perplexingly, he was also convinced that only one of those authors plotted both scenes (and indeed the rest of the play as well) and that there was no revision involved at all. 51 As unlikely as this may seem, given that we have already detected structural inconsistencies suggestive of revision between two scenes in Act 1 on the one hand and a scene in each of Acts 2 and 3 on the other, Dover Wilson’s perceptive analysis of the usage of historical sources in the play
50 51
Ibid. Wilson 1952a, pp. xxxvii–xxxviii.
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makes it clear that his explanation is indeed the most probable of all those put forward. He argues that 1.3 and 3.1 were always intended to feature in the first and subsequent performances of harey the vj and that the discontinuities between the scenes result not from revision but from a process of incompletely harmonised collaboration—hypotheses supported by the fact that both 1.1 and 3.1 are, along with 3.2, the only scenes in all of Shakespeare’s history plays to draw on Robert Fabyan’s The New Chronicles of England and France. 52 Dover Wilson shows how 1.3 and 3.1 contain specific ‘picturesque details’ not found in the other chronicle sources of the play concerning two incidents of civil unrest: one which occurred at London Bridge in 1425 and one in Leicester the following year, the latter of which, as Fabyan tells us, became known as the ‘Parliament of Bats’. 53 ‘In short,’ Dover Wilson concludes, ‘the two scenes, 1. 3 and 3. 1, are tied so closely together by a criss-cross debt to Fabyan that one cannot imagine them independently conceived and plotted.’ 54 In the Oxford Textual Companion, Taylor discusses how the inconsistency in Winchester’s rank might have been solved in performance, and, without referring to it directly, reinforces Dover Wilson’s hypothesis that revision was not the cause of the discrepancy:
This inconsistency could have been dealt with either by altering the dialogue of 1.4/Sc. 4 [1.3] or by omitting eighteen lines in 5.1/Sc. 29 [5.1]. If the second option had been chosen, the cut might have been signalled in the foul papers by the usual vertical line in the left margin, which might in turn have been ignored by the Folio compositor; this hypothesis would allow us to suppose that the problem had been solved in the foul papers
52
Robert Fabyan, The New Chronicles of England and France (1516), repr. 1811. Ibid. p. 596. 54 Wilson 1952a, p. xxxvii. 53
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themselves. However, this option leaves Winchester (and Exeter and the ambassadors) without a word to speak or function to perform in 5.1/Sc.29 [5.1]; as a result, moreover, the rivalry between Winchester and Gloucester, so prominent in Acts 1 and 3, entirely disappears from the last two acts; Winchester’s central role in the disgraceful peace treaty of 5.6/Sc. 34 [5.4] consequently is divorced from his ecclesiastical ambition and his rivalry with Gloucester. The omission of the offending lines from 5.2/Sc. 30 [sic: Taylor surely means 5.1/Sc. 29] not only sadly weakens the scene itself, but more fundamentally undermines the play’s only unifying theme: dissension at home as the cause of defeat abroad. By contrast, the minor alteration of six lines in 1.4/Sc. 4 [1.3], removing all references to Winchester as a cardinal, would have no appreciable negative effect upon either the scene itself or the structure of the play. 55
Clearly, delaying the elevation of Winchester to the rank of cardinal until 5.1 is the dramatically more effective alternative, and was always the intention of the author of 3.1. The hypothesis that 1.1 and 2.1 and now 1.3 and 3.1 preserve two dramatisations of the same source material by different playwrights can be tested by examining the scenes in Acts 1, 3 and 4 connected with the exploits of Sir John Fastolf which have been touched on above. Henneman discusses ‘the four mystifying repetitions of Fastolfe’s cowardice’ in ‘The Episodes’. 56 The first account is given in 1.1 by the third messenger (lines 121–34 quoted above). He reports that a ‘dismal fight’(105) took place while Talbot was ‘Retiring from the siege of Orléans’(111). Talbot was eventually taken prisoner by the French among the ‘general wrack and
55 56
TC, p. 218. Henneman 1900, pp. 299–303.
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massacre’(135) that ensued from Fastolf’s desertion, and upon his release in 1.4, the Scourge of France has this to say about the cowardly knight:
But O, the treacherous Fastolf wounds my heart, Whom with my bare fists I would execute If I now had him brought into my power. (34–6)
Talbot’s account is in perfect accord with that of the third messenger. In 3.2 however, Fastolf turns tail again, this time before our eyes, during the battle for Rouen:
An alarum; excursions. Enter SIR JOHN FASTOLF and a CAPTAIN
CAPTAIN Whither away, Sir John Fastolf, in such haste? FASTOLF Whither away? To save myself by flight; We are like to have the overthrow again. CAPTAIN What will you fly and leave Lord Talbot? FASTOLF
Ay,
All the Talbots in the world to save my life.
Exit
CAPTAIN Cowardly knight, ill fortune follow thee. (104–9)
And in order to make absolutely sure the audience has no doubts about the congenital cowardice of Fastolf, in the first scene of Act 4 Talbot denounces him before the King and tears the Garter from his ‘craven’s leg’(16). In an apparently fitting, though in fact completely improbable, piece of dramatic construction, the treacherous knight had come before Henry bearing the news of Burgundy’s defection to the French 107
cause. As Gaw observed, in 3.4 and 4.1 we see Talbot’s star at its highest ascension. Outraged by the presence of Fastolf, he relates to the court:
This dastard, at the battle of Patay, When but in all I was six thousand strong And that the French were almost ten to one, Before we met or that a stroke was given, Like to a trusty squire did run away; In which assault we lost twelve hundred men; Myself and divers gentlemen beside Were there surprised and taken prisoners. (19–26) 57
By this stage one may well wonder if there was a single battle in the Hundred Years War Fastolf did not run away from. Of the three accounts, Henneman considered this one closest to the chronicles. In the first account of the battle of Patay (near Orléans) given by the third messenger at 1.1.103–161, Talbot has the same number of troops as he specifies above but the odds are more like four to one (112–3), as described in the chronicles. There is further disagreement over the timing of Fastolf’s flight: in 1.1 the battle had already been raging for some time, according to the messenger, before the knight ‘played the coward’(131), but in 4.1 Talbot testifies that Fastolf fled ‘Before we met or that a stroke was given’(22). It would seem that either F preserves two narrations of the same episode by one playwright, who for some reason failed to harmonise them, or, as seems more likely, two playwrights have interpreted the
57 F reads ‘Poictiers’ at TLN 1875 (4.1.19), which editors since Malone have considered an authorial mistake for ‘Patay’ (near Orléans).
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chronicles differently; one following Holinshed’s (following Halle’s) description of Fastolf fleeing an engaged battle ‘without anie stroke stricken’, the other applying the phrase to the English and French armies instead, presumably in an effort to make Fastolf’s desertion seem even more cowardly. 58 The dramatising of Fastolf’s desertion before Rouen in 3.2 is puzzling to say the least; any self-respecting coward would run away just once after all. Dover Wilson noted that TLN 1541–1550 in F are preceded and followed by unusual blank spaces. 59 Is it possible that three different playwrights dramatised the Fastolf material in 1 Henry VI? According to Taylor’s division of the play, this is in fact what happened, although he does not cite the peculiarity of the repetitions as supporting evidence. 60 The playwright(s) clearly intended to use and re-use the arrant treachery of Fastolf as a foil to Talbot’s patriotism but, as F stands, the three different dramatisations conflict in ways that suggest not only multiple authorship, but also that some, if not all of the inconsistencies would have been harmonised before the original performances of harey the vj. We have seen that Henneman argued persuasively for 2.1 repeating events narrated in 1.1. The two scenes present distinctly different dramatisations of the same source material, exactly as 1.1 and 4.1 have been shown to do above. That 3.2 dramatises a most improbable second desertion by Fastolf after that narrated in 1.1 and 1.4 and before yet another, altered account of that first desertion, would seem best explained by the hypothesis that more than one playwright dramatised the Fastolf material in Acts 1, 3, and 4. When we take into account Dover
58 Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2nd edn. (1587), repr. in 6 vols., 1808, iii, 601, hereafter cited as ‘Holinshed’. It is from the battle of Patay, fought in 1429, that Holinshed has Fastolf fleeing ‘without anie stroke stricken’. 59 Wilson 1952a, p. 164. 60 Taylor 1995, pp. 168–9.
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Wilson’s convincing argument that 1.3 and 3.1 are not revisions of each other but differently authored, we can conclude that the structural complications caused by inconsistencies between scenes in Act 1 and scenes in every other act of 1 Henry VI are more likely to be due to unharmonised collaboration than to revision. In ‘Shakespeare and Others’ Taylor presents compelling evidence for the author of Act 1 not having written anything else in the play. 61 Apart from the confusion over Winchester’s rank, he cites none of the other structural complications analysed above in support of his authorship hypothesis. At this stage of my investigation, the arguments discussed here—the most convincing of the many published—that Henslowe’s harey the vj was either a revision of an old play or was itself revised years later into 1 Henry VI, have not withstood close scrutiny. Nevertheless, the hypothesis that the play did undergo considerable restructuring, and that F preserves traces of this, is supported by the evidence presented by Gaw and Mincoff for the revision of the York/Somerset plot element.
2.6 The Restoration of Plantagenet ‘to his blood’ (2.4–3.1) No critic convinced of Shakespeare’s sole authorship has more thoroughly scrutinised the construction of 1 Henry VI than Mincoff. The other leading critics of the play— Fleay, Gaw, Dover Wilson, and Taylor—all concluded that the play is a collaboration. In order to justify his attribution of the whole of 1 Henry VI to Shakespeare, Mincoff, one of the play’s most sensitive interpreters, concluded that F preserves extensive revisions. One reason why Mincoff’s criticism is so important is that he did not simply pass over evidence that poses a threat to his hypothesis. Another is that he was
61
This evidence is discussed in Chapter 4.
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prepared to acknowledge the play’s shortcomings. After outlining and praising the basic structure of the play, Mincoff writes in The First Steps:
Unfortunately, however, Shakespeare seems to have had a general plan in his head, but not a detailed scenario. And in the process of work he seems to have come up against difficulties that had not been foreseen. One was that patriotism held him back from presenting the disasters in their full light. Every French victory is immediately outtopped by an English one, so that the effect of steadily accumulating losses is dissipated, and even the final peace is glossed over to seem almost like an English victory. And a further difficulty was that the crescendo of deaths finally left the English without a suitable commander to take over. 62
Mincoff suggests that the competing themes of the selfless patriotism of the older generation (Salisbury, Bedford, Talbot) and the reckless self-interest of the new (York, Somerset, Suffolk) were not fully thought through in the play’s first conception. His exegesis is entirely to our purpose and therefore worth reproducing in full:
The choice of York…to break the power of Joan’s witchcraft and patriotically lament over the effeminate peace, was not, with a view to his later role in the trilogy, a happy one. And it would seem that either at this point, or perhaps even later, when he came to write the second part, Shakespeare realized this and tried to give York rather more of a build-up in order to mitigate this effect and prepare him for his role of Machiavel. And so he went back on his work, introducing a series of scenes, chiefly II iv–III i, and some
62
Mincoff 1976, p. 20.
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additions to the coronation scene, dealing with York and his aspirations, which upset the flow of his first concept. The proof of this, apart from the break in York’s character, and the inappropriateness in his mouth of the indictment—
Have we not lost most part of all the towns, By treason, falsehood, and by treachery—
[5.4.108–9]
which, after his own abandonment of Talbot, sounds very hollow, is threefold. Firstly [2.4 and 2.5]…are so much better written than the surrounding matter…that they make the impression of an insertion on that account alone. Moreover, if we imagine this sequence away, the episode of the Countess which now seems like a naïve excrescence out of tune with all the rest of the play, immediately receives a functional value as a point of contrast between the siege of Orleans and of Rouen, and instead of seeming an excrescence satisfies one as an artistic necessity. As the play now stands that point of contrast is given twice over, with a grating instead of a soothing effect. And finally, within this sequence of York scenes, an episode of the quarrel between Gloucester and Winchester was also inserted, in order not to keep the limelight centred on York for too long. 63
Mincoff’s arguments for substantial revision in this part of the play immediately appear more persuasive than those considered in the previous section. Clearly the Countess scene (2.3) would be more dramatically effective as a break between sieges without the intervention of the famous Rose Plucking scene (2.4), the only one in the play that all five leading critics agree to be entirely by Shakespeare. In ‘Shakespeare and Others’, Taylor pays significant attention to the play’s structure only in relation to
63
Ibid. pp. 20–1.
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2.4: the scene is not a ‘substantial revision’, he argues, but one of a few ‘piecemeal adjustments [made] at a late stage of composition’, before 3 March 1592:
Part One contains a few examples of such adjustment. In particular, II.iv may have been added late, for two reasons: first in order to improve the play’s structure, by the earlier introduction of Plantagenet, Warwick, and Somerset, and of the dispute between the two factions; secondly, in order to link the play prospectively to the two plays, already written and hence familiar to audiences, on the rest of the reign of Henry VI (Contention and Duke of York). Many critics have suspected that the scene was an inspired afterthought; certainly, the subsequent action makes sense without it, and Alison [sic] Gaw plausibly contends that II.v makes much better sense if it is not preceded by II.iv. Admittedly, proof is unobtainable; but II.iv might be a late addition, and if so Shakespeare’s presence in an act apparently written by someone else, in a scene wholly unrelated to the rest of his contribution, makes rather better sense. 64
The reasons Gaw presented for the Tower scene (2.5) making better sense if it is not preceded by the Rose Plucking scene (2.4) are not just plausible; they are compelling. If 2.4 was not part of the original conception of the play, or more precisely, if scenes 2.3 and 2.5 were written before 2.4, Richard Plantagenet would presumably have appeared for the first time in the play in 2.5. There are strong indicators in the text that originally this was indeed so. It seems that as far as the author of 2.5 was concerned, not only Mortimer but also Plantagenet was new to the audience. At line 2 Mortimer introduces himself as ‘dying Mortimer’ and repeats his name in full, ‘Edmund Mortimer’ in line 7. He asks for his ‘nephew’(17) and the keeper answers, ‘Richard Plantagenet, my lord, will come’. Before he arrives the old man has time to
64
Taylor 1995, pp. 170–1.
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explain his background to the audience and introduce the catalyst for the play’s third main plot element: Richard’s due restoration to his ‘blood’, his ‘honour and inheritance’(27). At line 33 the keeper pointedly announces ‘My lord, your loving nephew now is come’, which is directly followed by Mortimer’s equally pointed ‘Richard Plantagenet, my friend, is he come?’. Richard, at last, has his cue:
Ay, noble uncle, thus ignobly used; Your nephew, late-despisèd Richard, comes. (35–6)
As Gaw observes, ‘the technique is unmistakable’. 65 Mortimer is deliberately named twice, Richard Plantagenet is named in full twice and twice more as Richard only, and their relationship is indicated no less than four times (ll. 17, 32, 35, 36). The dramatist is obviously introducing both of them to the audience as new characters. If the Tower scene had always preceded the Rose Plucking scene, in which Richard is the central character, there would be no need for such deliberate repetition. It is equally demonstrable that 3.1—in which none of the events depicted in 2.4 are directly referred to—always followed 2.5 and that it clearly relies on Mortimer’s revelations in the Tower. Richard’s first speech in 3.1 is an aside (ll. 61–4), in which he emphasises his lack of lordly status, and the main section of the scene concerning
65
Gaw 1926, p. 105.
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him (ll. 148–77), takes for granted the information disclosed by the dying Mortimer. 66 Both would be incomprehensible if both 2.4 and 2.5 were absent, but completely intelligible if 2.5 alone were present. Moreover, the phrase ‘to be restorèd to my blood’ from Richard’s closing speech in 2.5 is pointedly echoed twice in 3.1 (ll. 158– 9). From another perspective, Gaw noted that with the Rose Plucking scene in place, the Tower scene is dramatically superfluous, and that 2.4 alone gives sufficient preparation for 3.1. If it had been composed before 2.5, there would be no reason for the dramatist to go to the trouble of inventing an episode in which Plantagenet is summoned to the Tower because his uncle is at death’s door.67 Conversely, one can easily identify the seeds which Shakespeare took from the older 2.5 and germinated into the Temple Garden of 2.4. Lines 45–50 of the Tower scene refer to a quarrel between York and Somerset arising from an ‘argument upon a case’(45), and are not so much an echo of 2.4 as an explanation for Richard’s desire to hear the full story of his father’s death. This passage, it would seem, together with the keeper’s earlier speech telling Mortimer that they had ‘sent unto the Temple, unto his chamber’(19), presented Shakespeare with the basic situation and action for the Rose Plucking scene. The dramaturgical differences between the scenes suggest that 2.4 was not only added later, but that it was also intended to replace 2.5. As Gaw describes it, the Rose Plucking scene is:
66 At 3.4.29 Vernon charges Basset with disgracing York’s ‘colours’ (which he is wearing)—not a specific rose, which suggests that the author was unaware of the action of 2.4. Not until 4.1.91 does the word ‘rose’ appear after the Rose Plucking scene. 67 This is the primary reason Plantagenet goes to the Tower—his title is a secondary concern. See Chapter 1, pp. 67–8, for the different locations of Mortimer’s death in 1 and 2 Henry VI.
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a more modern, direct, and vital revelation of the facts through violent dispute for the antiquated opening monologue and “talky” exposition of the Mortimer scene (especially unnatural in the mouth of a man who dies of weakness at its end); and also because by the use of the Roses motif it lays a foundation for the entire tetralogy of 1-2-3 Henry VIRichard III. 68
Further compelling stylistic, linguistic, and metrical evidence distinguishing 2.4 from its surroundings will be presented in Chapter 4. My discussion here has made it clear, however, that Gaw’s meticulous exegesis of the three scenes 2.4, 2.5, and 3.1 reveals much more than Taylor seems prepared to acknowledge. ‘Admittedly,’ the latter concludes, ‘proof is unobtainable; but II.iv might be a late addition, and if so Shakespeare’s presence in an act apparently written by someone else, in a scene wholly unrelated to the rest of his contribution, makes rather better sense.’ 69 But the Rose Plucking scene, far from being ‘wholly unrelated’ to the rest of what Taylor considers to be Shakespeare’s work in the play (4.2–4.7.32), is in fact directly related to scenes 4.3 and 4.4 in which the enmity between York and Somerset brings about the death of Talbot (4.5–7). None of the play’s commentators has noted the discontinuity between the Vernon who appears in 2.4 and the one who takes the stage in 3.4 and 4.1. In each of the latter two scenes a private disagreement between Vernon and Basset disrupts the proceedings of Henry’s court. On both occasions their quarrelling is childish and utterly devoid of wit. The dramatist is deliberately doubling the events and thematic
68 69
Gaw 1926, p. 105. Taylor 1995, p. 171.
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concern of 1.3 and 3.1. We witness again discord which, having originated with England’s noble ‘leaders’ (here York and Somerset; in 1.3 and 3.1 Gloucester and Winchester) has spread among their lower ranked ‘followers’ (here Vernon and Basset; earlier the ‘blue coats’ and the ‘tawny coats’). In 4.1 Vernon is the ‘servant’(80) of York, and Somerset identifies Basset as his at line 81. In the Temple Garden, however, Vernon is addressed by both Somerset and Plantagenet as ‘Good Master Vernon’(43, 128)—that is, as a gentleman. Indeed Burns, in his Arden3 edition, describes Vernon in his ‘List of Roles’ as ‘a gentleman of the Inns of Court, who joins the party of Richard Plantagenet’.70 Basset is ‘a follower of the Duke of Somerset’. 71 It would seem that the author of the Rose Plucking scene was not concerned to link the discord of England’s nobles with that of their servants in the manner of the author(s) of 1.3, 3.1, 3.4, and 4.1: all of the parts in 2.4 are for learned and witty nobles and gentlemen. The different conceptions of Vernon can be added to the evidence already collected that suggests 2.4 was much more than a ‘piecemeal adjustment’. The Rose Plucking scene represents a far more methodical and, to use Taylor’s phrase, ‘substantial revision’. Mincoff, because he insists on Shakespeare’s authorship of the entire Henry VI trilogy and on the composition of its parts in the Folio order, is obliged to posit that the playwright substantially revised his initial conception of the play and ‘went back on his work, introducing a series of scenes, chiefly II iv–III i, and some additions to the coronation scene [4.1], dealing with York and his aspirations’. 72 Fifty years earlier Gaw had in fact demonstrated the far likelier method behind the
70
Burns 2000, p. 106. Ibid. 72 Mincoff 1976, p. 20. 71
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revision. Nevertheless, for both critics substantial revision was the only way to explain the play’s structural irregularities. It is now time to compare the conclusions of Dover Wilson, which are recorded in his Cambridge edition of the play, with those of Gaw and Mincoff.
2.7 Dover Wilson’s Revising Shakespeare ‘I draw to an end of this edition of Henry VI,’ writes Dover Wilson in his foreword to 1 Henry VI, ‘with some relief.’ 73 This extraordinary statement prefaces a truly extraordinary edition, and reading further we soon realise that since first turning to the project in May 1948, Dover Wilson had lived and breathed the plays for four years, wrestling with their ‘vexatiously intricate’ problems. This is the primary reason why his edition of 1 Henry VI is unique: he took the play very, very personally. He took Shakespeare even more personally and he was absolutely certain that Shakespeare did not write most of 1 Henry VI. His introductory comments remain as valid they were half a century ago:
Many Shakespearian scholars to-day, and among them the most eminent, make no question of [the authorship of the Henry VI plays] at all. The evidence has driven me to disagree with them, and much space in the Introduction to Parts I and II has had therefore to be given to this important matter; important for the biographical issues involved, and still more for the aesthetic ones, inasmuch as our whole conception of the nature of Shakespeare’s poetic genius turns upon it. 74
73 74
Wilson 1952a, p. vii. Ibid.
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From the first Dover Wilson was criticised for rudely awakening a debate the rest of the Shakespeare world considered had been put to bed by Alexander twenty years earlier. But while the primary concern of Dover Wilson’s editions is who wrote the plays, most of his critics, outraged by his unrepentantly ‘disintegrationist’ approach, ignored what he had to say on Shakespeare’s early style, the date of the plays, and their theatrical and literary origins. While Dover Wilson’s hypotheses for the chronology and authorship of the Henry VI plays represent the ne plus ultra of aesthetics-based attributional criticism, they also reveal a rare sensitivity to the style of Shakespeare and his early contemporaries, and specifically to the styles of writing found in 1 Henry VI. By declaring his allegiance to Malone and insisting that Shakespeare merely revised the Henry VI plays to a greater or lesser degree, improving as he did so the original work of playwrights like Greene and Nashe, Dover Wilson effectively put the kiss of death on his own critical legacy. Consequently, his important contribution to the scholarship on 1 Henry VI in the middle of the twentieth century is today little recognised. Taylor considers Dover Wilson’s ‘lifelong obsession’ with theories of revision ‘tended to obscure the otherwise considerable merits’ of his editions of the Henry VI plays. 75 The stigma so publicly attached to Dover Wilson’s criticism by Chambers in his 1924 British Academy lecture has ensured that no critic has thoroughly investigated his hypotheses for the genesis of the Henry VI plays or fully appraised the evidence he presented in support of them. 76
75 76
Taylor 1995, p. 169. Chapter 4 performs such an investigation.
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Like the hypotheses of Fleay and Gaw before him, and that of Mincoff after, Dover Wilson’s hypothesis for the origin and development of 1 Henry VI presents Shakespeare as a revising playwright. He summarises his line-by-line attribution of the play in relation to Shakespeare as follows:
Shakespeare’s hand is to be seen, I claim, in thirteen or fourteen out of the twenty-one scenes of the last four acts; two of them (2.4; 2.5) being almost wholly his, four the result of a thorough revision of the basic text, and the rest either slightly touched up or rewritten in part only. 77
As we have seen at the beginning of this chapter, Taylor relies on little more than the power of his rhetoric to dismiss not just Dover Wilson’s revision theory but that of every other critic as well. He does so without acknowledging that most scholars— including his four most incisive predecessors—who have investigated the genesis of 1 Henry VI insist that substantial revision by Shakespeare is the best way to explain the structural inconsistencies in F. Taylor’s proclamation that such voluminous criticism ‘should no longer be taken seriously’, after only one page of discussion, is dismissive rather than demonstrative. But examination of Taylor’s earlier work on the play reveals that in 1987 he was in fact more tolerant of the notion that the text had been revised—or more substantially ‘adjusted’—than in 1995.
77
Wilson 1952a, p. xli.
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2.8 Taylor in Two Minds: Revising Reignier In ‘Shakespeare and Others’, we read:
[Dover] Wilson…noted that Reignier plays no part in the chronicles until Suffolk’s wooing of Margaret (V.v); hence his conspicuous presence from I.ii onwards cannot be disentangled from the allegedly late interpolation of V.v. Indeed recent critics rightly object that such theories ignore and distort the real structural and thematic unity of the play, which organizes much disparate chronicle material by a means of a frame of reference (civil discord) obviously related to the events of Contention [2 Henry VI] and Duke of York [3 Henry VI]. 78
In the earlier Textual Companion, Taylor presents the following argument concerning ‘later’ passages in F and the role of Reignier (whose name is changed to ‘René’ in the Oxford text):
Two passages—1.1.103–51/103–51, 2.4/Sc. 12—appear to have been written later than the material around them, by a different hand; disparities between stage directions and speech-prefixes in 3.3/Sc. 16 [3.2] and 3.5/Sc. 18 [3.2] suggest that René’s part in Acts 1–4 was an after-thought, and that his speeches had originally been distributed among the other French nobles. 79
In his 1995 article, Taylor is adamant that the entirety of Act 1 is by Nashe alone; no mention is made in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ of different hands being present in the
78 79
Taylor 1995, p. 170. TC, p. 217.
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first scene of the play. 80 Much more glaring, however, is his failure to mention in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ his earlier opinion that Reignier’s speeches before Act 5 were originally intended for the other French nobles. In section 4 above I assessed Gaw’s persuasive argument that the Suffolk/Margaret plot element was not part of the play’s original conception. In Origin and Development Gaw does not notice the bibliographical disparities concerning Reignier which Taylor notices in Textual Companion and ‘unnotices’ in ‘Shakespeare and Others’. Had he done so, his case would have been even stronger and as such more difficult for Dover Wilson and later Taylor to refute. 81 The question begs to be asked: why, after identifying significant bibliographical inconsistencies in F suggesting that Reignier’s part in the first four acts was an ‘afterthought’ in 1987, does Taylor neglect to mention them eight years later? It is telling that he also neglects to name, even in an endnote, the ‘recent critics’ who ‘rightly object’ to the theories of revision he is trying to discredit. My own survey of every ‘recent’ article and book published on 1 Henry VI has revealed that since Gaw, no one has analysed the structure of the play as a whole more trenchantly than Mincoff, who as we have seen, concluded that Shakespeare had extensively revised his own work, almost certainly before and after 3 March 1592. 82 Taylor himself judges Mincoff’s article ‘The Composition of Henry VI, Part I’, to be the ‘most detailed and astute modern analysis of the whole play’s verbal style’. 83 No other recent critic approaches
80 Taylor’s ‘division of shares’ (TC, p. 217) divides the first scene of Act 1 into three sections: the first 102 lines are attributed to ‘Y? (or X)’; the next 49 to ‘?’, and the final 25 to ‘Y? (or X)’. 81 Chapter 3 begins a full bibliographical analysis of the Folio text which is continued in Chapter 4. 82 See my Bibliography for a complete listing. 83 Taylor 1995, p. 163.
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Mincoff’s penetration, whether discussing the (re)structuring and thematic (dis)unity of 1 Henry VI or its exceptionally uneven verbal style. Taylor’s uncharacteristic invocation of unspecified ‘recent critics’ to support his argument here appears to be linked to the over-reliance on his formidable authorship hypothesis I posited at the beginning of this chapter. I have deliberately placed this chapter before my appraisal of Taylor’s authorship hypothesis in order to investigate as objectively as possible the aspects of the play he ignored. That Taylor’s tidy division of the play between Nashe, Shakespeare and two unnamed playwrights is in fact too tidy is demonstrated by a discussion of the relationship between the two scenes—4.5 and 4.6—that exhibit the strongest evidence for substantial revision having played a part in the composition of 1 Henry VI.
2.9 The Bordeaux Sequence: The Talbots E. Pearlman is the only recent critic to have examined an aspect of the structure of 1 Henry VI with a precision approaching that of Gaw and Mincoff. 84 In his 1996 article ‘Shakespeare at Work: The Two Talbots’ he puts beyond reasonable doubt that scene 4.5 of 1 Henry VI was written to replace 4.6 and that ‘the obvious redundancy’ of the F sequence is not an ‘error of artistry but a flaw of transmission’. 85 His conclusion is by no means original, and he acknowledges the conclusions Dover Wilson and J. P. Brockbank reached in their work in the early 1950s. They agreed that 4.5 was written by Shakespeare to replace 4.6, but disagreed over who authored the original. 86 Dover
84
Oddly, both earlier critics had little to say on 4.5 and 4.6. E. Pearlman, ‘Shakespeare at Work: The Two Talbots’, PQ, 75 (1996), 1–22, at p. 2. Hereafter cited as ‘Pearlman 1996’. 86 Wilson 1952a, pp. xlv–xlvii; J. P. Brockbank, ‘Shakespeare’s Historical Myth: A Study of Shakespeare’s Adaptations of his Sources in making the Plays of Henry VI and Richard III (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1953), p. 27. 85
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Wilson, certain that it was not Shakespearean, remained however uncertain which of Greene, Nashe or Peele was responsible for it. Brockbank, whom Pearlman considers ‘very level-headed’ in comparison to Dover Wilson, concluded that Shakespeare wrote 4.5 when he became dissatisfied with his own first version during the original composition of the play. 87 Pearlman, like almost every other recent critic of the play, assumes:
a) that Shakespeare wrote 1 Henry VI in its entirety; b) that 1 Henry VI precedes 2 and 3 Henry [sic]; c) that 1 Henry VI is either the first or among the very earliest of Shakespeare’s surviving writings; d) that Nashe’s description of Talbot refers to Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI and not to any other Henry play; e) that 1 Henry VI is recorded in Henslowe’s Diary under the name harey the vi [sic]’. 88
He is unique, however, in his full acknowledgement of his assumptions; most critics believe the above assumptions to be absolute facts and in no need of any justification at all. Pearlman consequently inhabits an interesting critical locus between Dover Wilson and Taylor. His careful stylistic analysis and comparison of the two scenes cement Dover Wilson’s conclusion that 4.5 is a revision and intended replacement for 4.6. Pearlman’s conclusion is therefore in opposition to Taylor’s in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ that F shows no sign of ‘substantial revision’. 89 At the same time though, Pearlman agrees with Brockbank and Taylor (and disagrees with Dover Wilson) that both scenes were written by Shakespeare. By looking again at the two scenes, with no
87
Pearlman 1996, p. 3. Ibid. p. 20, n. 3. Pearlman read Taylor’s article only after his own was completed. He makes no reference to Taylor’s position on revision in 1 Henry VI. 88 89
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preconceptions about their authorship, it is possible to show that their differences cannot be fully explained by self-revision—especially revision that, as Pearlman and Brockbank argue, followed hard on the original drafting of the scene. Until Act 4, scene 2, Talbot is the play’s invincible and entirely onedimensional protagonist. But during the Bordeaux sequence (4.2–7) he becomes three dimensional: not just the embodiment of ‘the idealized heart of English chivalry’ (Pearlman’s apt description), but a very real ‘English John Talbot’, no longer the Scourge of France but a weary warrior who is also an affectionate and loving father. 90 Something has changed. For Taylor, 4.2 is the play’s first scene by Shakespeare in which Talbot appears. It marks the beginning of the Bordeaux sequence that Fleay insisted was added by Shakespeare years after the original performances of a play he had previously had no connection with. The reinvention of Talbot heralded by 4.2 led Mincoff to write in The First Steps: ‘here…we come on writing so far above the body of the play that I am compelled to think of a later rewriting of these scenes [4.2–7]’. 91 In his earlier article on the composition of 1 Henry VI, Mincoff is more specific:
It seems most probable that if Shakespeare revised the play somewhere about 1594, and I agree with Chambers that IV.ii can hardly be any earlier, he rewrote the whole Talbot sequence then, and Nashe’s reference is actually to an earlier version of it. 92
The revision of 4.6 into 4.5 would gain still more plausibility if it could be shown to have been part of a general revision of the entire Bordeaux sequence. 93 Apparently in
90
Pearlman 1996, p. 3–7. Mincoff 1976, p. 82. Mincoff 1965, p. 283. 93 Pearlman displays no awareness of Mincoff’s work on 1 Henry VI, which is surprising because Taylor rightly judges it to be the best on the play’s verbal style. 91 92
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an effort to further undermine revision theories, Taylor misrepresents Mincoff’s argument that the three distinct styles the latter detects in the play are all Shakespearean:
Mincoff tentatively suggests, as a way of accounting for these deficiencies [of style] while “saving” the whole play for Shakespeare, that Shakespeare’s style “developed” phenomenally rapidly, in the very course of writing this play. 94
My own careful reading of Mincoff’s article reveals such an interpretation to be tangential at best. In any case, it is Mincoff’s conclusions, not his tentative suggestions that should concern us:
at some stage in the writing no longer specifiable the original plan was modified, the sequence of York scenes was introduced at a point where there was already a break in the action, and the play was then brought to a conclusion. The task may even have been abandoned for a time while these readjustments were being thought out, and work was begun on The Taming of the Shrew. Finally at a revival of the play sometime about 1594 the crowning scenes—the sequence of Talbot’s death—were rewritten, much as the highlights of The Spanish Tragedy were later refurbished, to provide a fresh attraction. 95
Mincoff admits the hypothetical nature of these comments, but can see no other acceptable explanation for the play’s origin. He, like Fleay, Gaw, and Dover Wilson (and the majority of the play’s lesser critics) before him, was convinced that substantial revision played an integral part in the genesis of F. By not properly
94 95
Taylor 1995, p. 163. Mincoff 1965, p. 287.
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representing Mincoff’s argument for revision in 1 Henry VI, Taylor obscures the fact that he alone of the play’s five most thorough critics denies substantial revision, which may have taken place years after the original composition of the play. Returning to the relationship between 4.5 and 4.6, Pearlman repeatedly implies that the revision took place during the original composition of the play: Shakespeare wrote 4.6, was almost immediately dissatisfied with it and then straight away wrote 4.5. Late in his article, however, Pearlman does admit of the possibility that the revision could have been undertaken years later:
It is impossible to say when all this was done, but a good guess is that it took place before the early performances to which Nashe refers and that it was certainly completed by the middle 1590s when Shakespeare lost interest in stichomythia. 96
Significant doubt is cast over the hypothesis that the author of the draft shortly afterwards composed the revision by a comparison of the couplets in the two scenes. Pearlman and Dover Wilson both demonstrate that they are of very different poetic quality. 97 But whereas Pearlman is entirely willing to accept that the originator of the extremely marked improvements both detect in 4.5 was also the originator of the earlier 4.6, Dover Wilson is not. Although Pearlman’s discussion of the manifold structural, rhetorical and stylistic differences between the scenes is lengthy and impressive, he fails to register some important discrepancies his predecessor had identified.
96 97
Pearlman 1996, p. 17. Ibid. pp. 8–17; Wilson 1952a, pp. xlv–xlvii.
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Dover Wilson notices that the couplets in 4.5 are ‘end-stopped as couplets normally should be, run easily from first to last, and though displaying no obvious signs of genius are unexceptionable in metre and diction’. Those of 4.6 are ‘looser, often overrun, not without forced rhymes and unnecessary line-filling words’. 98 But the key characteristic of 4.6 which convinced Dover Wilson the scenes must have been composed by different authors is its ‘poverty-stricken diction’:
Note, for example, the verbal repetitions (e.g. ‘thou gav’st’, ll. 7, 9; ‘warlike’, ll. 8, 13; ‘bastard’, ll. 16, 20; ‘blood’, ll. 16, 20, 22, 23); the rhyme-born tautology of ‘lost and done’ (l. 7); the forcible-feeble tautology of ‘contaminated’, ‘base’, ‘misbegotten’, ‘mean and poor’ in ll. 21–3; and the bathetic nonsense of Talbot’s appeal, ll. 32–3:
O, too much folly is it, well I wot, To hazard all our lives in one small boat! 99
The draft also exhibits three archaisms in twenty lines: ‘well I wot’(32), ‘mickle age’(35) and ‘it is no boot’(52); all of which are in rhyme positions. Such usages are entirely absent from 4.5, although it needs to be registered that these archaisms do recur elsewhere in the Shakespeare canon. 100 The forced expression ‘in disgrace’ at 4.6.20, meaning ‘to insult him’, can only be rhyme-born, and Dover Wilson classifies the construction of line 53: ‘If son to Talbot, die at Talbot’s foot’ as ‘defective’. Pearlman does remark that the ‘vague syntax’ of lines 21–4 of 4.6 ‘makes it difficult
98
Wilson 1952a, p. xlv. Ibid. pp. xlv–xlvi. 100 A Literature Online search reveals that the expression ‘well I wot’ occurs once in each of Titus Andronicus, Richard II and A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. It is also found three times in 3 Henry VI, a play whose authorship remains uncertain. ‘Mickle age’ recurs just once in the Shakespeare canon, in 2 Henry VI, another play where collaboration is suspected by the editors of TC and myself. 99
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to construe the lines with confidence’(10) and in an endnote unwittingly reinforces Dover Wilson’s case for the scenes having originated from different poetic imaginations:
The adjectives “mean” and “poore” follow and have been divorced from the noun they modify; in the intervening phrase—“I spill of thine”—a genitive floats unmoored to a substantive. Syntactic clarity has been sacrificed to the “thine / mine” chime. 101
Neither critic identifies a comparable contortion of syntax in an attempt to achieve rhyme in 4.5. What Dover Wilson’s close analysis of 4.6 reveals is that its author was much less proficient in composing couplets in iambic pentameter than the author of 4.5. 102 Moreover, as Chapter 4 will discuss fully, the manifold differences between the two comparisons of Talbot and his son to Daedalus and Icarus (4.6.54–7 and 4.7.14–7), are also best explained by the hypothesis that they were not written by the same author. 103 The profound deficiencies exhibited in the style of the couplets in the draft are too intrinsic, too fundamental to have been corrected in the very short time Pearlman prefers to think elapsed between the composition of the two scenes. On pages 16 and 17 of his article Pearlman lists nine cast-iron reasons ‘to believe that act 4, scene 6 is a first, less mature version of act 4, scene 5’, which collectively come as close to proof as we can hope for in this kind of inquiry. But Pearlman posits a revision process very different to that evident from other examples
101
Pearlman 1996, p. 20, n. 8. Mincoff’s dismissal of all of Shakespeare’s couplets—he thinks they are ‘seldom very good’—is a gross generalisation; that he has nothing specific to say about the stylistic differences between 4.5 and 4.6 marks a rare loss of focus in his argument. Nowhere are Shakespeare’s couplets as tortured and tautological as they are in 4.6. Mincoff decides all of the couplets in the Bordeaux sequence were added in the 1594 revision because in his early plays Shakespeare ‘was not much given to rhyme’, and because not until Richard II do we find anything comparable to the long rhymed speeches seen in 1 Henry VI. 103 See subsection 6.2 of Chapter 4 below. 102
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of apparent self-revision in the Shakespeare canon. Neither of Pearlman’s examples— the successive reports of Portia’s death in Julius Caesar; the erroneous printing of two versions of Berowne’s speech beginning ‘O, we have made a vow to study, lords’(IV.iii.315) in Love’s Labour’s Lost—or even the far more extensive revisions evident in the two texts of King Lear—exhibits anything like the complete metamorphosis of dramaturgical and poetic proficiency we see here. 104 The internal evidence strongly suggests both that 4.5 was written to replace 4.6—which was printed in 1623 by mistake—and that the scenes are the products of two distinct poetic imaginations. What is now the second scene in which Talbot and his son fight for their lives (4.6) was in all probability the first and only such scene performed at the Rose before the first audiences of harey the vj. We therefore owe the existence of the strongest evidence of substantial revision in F to a fortuitous ‘flaw of transmission’ in the printing house. While he observes that ‘it is not until Richard II that we find anything comparable to these long rhymed speeches [in the Bordeaux sequence]’, Mincoff completely overlooked the potential of 4.5 and 4.6 to reinforce his conclusion that Shakespeare rewrote the ‘crowning scenes’ of the play (4.2–7) for a revival ‘sometime about 1594’. 105 He concluded instead that the first three scenes of the sequence exhibited the strongest support for his hypothesis.
2.10 The Bordeaux Sequence: The Three Introductory Scenes In The First Steps Mincoff contends that:
104 105
Pearlman 1996, p. 2. Mincoff 1976, p. 82; Mincoff 1965, p. 287.
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the real case for a later revision [of the Bordeaux sequence] lies rather in the three short introductory scenes (IV ii–iv), and since they treat largely of the York and Somerset quarrel, it may be that they alone were inserted. Especially the first of them, in which only Talbot appears, is in a style distinctly different from anything we have met so far, or find for some time to come. 106
His ensuing analysis of 4.2 is the most astute of many that have identified a superior dramaturgy at work in the scene. It is important to stress that Mincoff considers all of 4.2–4, but especially 4.2, to be ‘of a riper period than the body of the play’, which includes, of course, 2.4, the Rose Plucking scene. That scene, as noted earlier, is the only one never denied Shakespeare by ‘disintegrationists’. Mincoff notes that the percentage of run-on lines, or enjambement, is considerably higher in 4.2 than in 2.4; Shakespeare has been shown to have used considerably more enjambement in his later plays than his earlier ones. 107 This piece of evidence is obviously of little significance by itself, but it is worth pointing out here, before the full-scale analysis of the play’s authorship presented in Chapter 4, that this particular variable is not considered by Taylor in the construction of his chronological hypothesis. In ‘The Composition of Henry VI, Part I’ Mincoff persuasively argues that parts of ‘the earlier version’[of the Bordeaux sequence]—‘IV.iii.1–16 in particular’—may have been preserved by Shakespeare when he rewrote the sequence for ‘a revival of the play sometime about 1594’. 108 Unfortunately, he did not elaborate on why he singles out 4.3.1–16. Dover Wilson believes that Sir William Lucy’s speeches in 4.3
106
Mincoff 1976, p. 82. See Jackson 2003, p. 63. 108 Mincoff 1965, pp. 283, 287. 107
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‘are a blend of two distinct styles’. 109 Gaw adds more reasons to doubt that the scene was written by the same playwright at a single period in time:
There are two points…connecting the present [4.3] with the original version. The sixteen lines of couplets (lines 28–33 and 37–46) have in general the antithesis and balance of the couplets in scenes [4.5–7]; and the extreme tautology of their balanced opening line, Mad ire, and wrathfull fury makes me weepe,
is not at all like Shakespeare…The growth of Lucy from a messenger into a man and the amount and the style of the couplet material therefore apparently fix the main outline and much of the text of the scene as original. 110
The convergent stylistic impressions of Gaw, Dover Wilson, and Mincoff ought not to be dismissed lightly, especially when the incompatibility of their hypotheses for the genesis of 1 Henry VI is remembered. It is the most insightful section of Pearlman’s article—a two-page endnote concerning the role of Sir William Lucy in the play—that helps to objectify the impressions of these critics. This minor character appears in only three scenes—4.3, 4.4, and 4.7—and has been a beacon for ‘absolutists’ and ‘disintegrationists’, as well as ‘revisionists’ from both camps. He is not present in the chronicle sources, but a Sir William Lucy of Charlecote was three times sheriff of Warwickshire in the reign of Henry VI. As Taylor observes, ‘only an author from that part of Warwickshire is likely to have known of Lucy or to have wanted to honor him by bringing him into the play in that way’. 111
109
Wilson 1952a, p. 178. Gaw 1926, p. 134. 111 Taylor 1995, p. 168. 110
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2.11 The Bordeaux Sequence: Sir William Lucy Scene 4.3 begins in F with the stage direction, ‘Enter a Messenger that meets Yorke.’ (TLN 2008). After sixteen lines of blank verse the stage direction, ‘Enter another Messenger.’ appears (TLN 2026). This second messenger is distinguished by the speech prefix ‘2. Mes.’ before his first speech (TLN 2027–33). The next three speeches not spoken by York are all prefixed ‘Mes.’, to whom York unaccountably says ‘Lucie farewell’ (TLN 2053) as he prepares to leave the stage. Ten lines after this much belated and informal identification—even though a change of scene is clearly required for Somerset and his army to enter—no exits appear in F for Mes., Mes.2., or Lucie after TLN 2063. Ten lines into 4.4 an unnamed Captain who had entered with Somerset at the beginning of the scene announces ‘Heere is Sir William Lucie, who with me / Set from our ore-matcht forces forth for ayde’ (TLN 2074–5). Here we have the suitably formal introduction of a new character to the audience—they would have had no way of knowing who the ‘Lucie’ was to whom York had so casually referred in the previous scene. Pearlman neatly explicates the apparently inexplicable:
The Captain’s lines make it absolutely clear that both he and the character named Sir William Lucy whom he introduces have just come from the camp of Talbot. Sir William Lucy explains that “L. Talbot, / …ring’d about with bold aduersitie, / Cries out for noble Yorke and Somerset” (13–15; TLN 2277–79). But once again there is illogicality: how can Sir William Lucy possibly be imagined to have come from Talbot in 4.4 when the “Lucie” of 4.3 has just seconds ago been seen in the company of York? Clearly, there is a dropped stitch, for no audience can be expected to believe that the same character has been present in two very different places in two consecutive moments…It seems as
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though there should be two separate characters, Mes./ 2 Mes. in 4.3 and Sir William Lucy in 4.4, and that the first of these was latterly labelled “Lucie” in error. 112
It is very surprising that no other critic seems to have picked up on the full extent of the confusion generated by the appearances of Sir William Lucy in 4.3 and 4.4. There is yet more to be gleaned about the (re)construction of 1 Henry VI from an examination of the role of Lucy in the final scene he appears in, 4.7. Taylor cites the presence of Lucy in 4.3 and 4.4 (he omits, for whatever reason, 4.7) as the clinching piece of evidence that Shakespeare wrote 2.4 and 4.2–4.7.32, and only those passages in the play, and it is not good, to say the least, for his argument that F has ‘Enter Lucie.’ at TLN 2284 (4.7.50), after which the peculiarly Shakespearean character speaks another twenty-nine lines before the scene ends . 113 Lucy’s first words have attracted editorial attention for centuries. Pearlman is again sharp-eyed on this speech:
The disturbing hexameter [line 52] suggests that Lu. was designed to amend an original speech heading Herald and that the manuscript must once have read:
Herald. Conduct me to the Dolphins Tent to know Who hath obtain’d the glory of the day.
Shakespeare, it is presumed, meant to change the speaker’s name from a generic herald to specific Lucy but somehow the extra syllables survived to spoil the pentameter. Once again “Lucie” appears to be a troublesome afterthought. A reasonable inference from these snags in the text is that there were originally two very minor characters—a messenger and a herald—whose lines were at some point grafted onto the character Sir
112 113
Pearlman 1996, p. 21, n. 11. Taylor 1995 , p. 168.
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William Lucy who first came into being in 4.4. Shakespeare therefore allowed York to call the character “Lucie” in 4.3 and he substituted Lu. for Herald in 4.7. 114
It is worth emphasising that Lucy is not only an after-thought but a ‘troublesome afterthought’. His appearances in 4.4, 4.5 and 4.7 create enough confusion in themselves to suggest these scenes were not set up by the Folio compositors from prompt-copy—it would have been impossible for the scenes to be performed successfully with so many ‘lost stitches’. Lucy was clearly not part of the original conception of the sequence and it is just as clear that the copy for F presented an incomplete authorial revision of apparently two very minor roles into that of Sir William Lucy. The nature of the copy for 1 Henry VI will be fully treated in the next chapter, but the exceptional disruptions of the iambic pentameter in 4.7 make it the scene that most strongly contradicts the notion that the manuscript behind F had been marked up by a book-keeper for performance. The first fifty lines of the scene (except lines 33 and 34) are rhymed couplets, after which Lucy enters and delivers the speech analysed above. The following six lines are unrhymed iambic pentameter but line 59, ‘But tell me whom thou seek’st?’(TLN 2293) has only six syllables. It is made even more conspicuous by line 60, which begins Lucy’s elegiac tribute to Talbot, also opening with ‘But’. Gaw calls the repetition an ‘un-Shakespearean rhetorical fault’, but I doubt that any dramatist of the period would have consciously written two consecutive lines beginning with the same conjunction in the same dramatic situation. Six lines from the end of the scene, Charles tells Lucy, ‘Go take their bodies hence’(TLN 2325), which is another trimeter, and Lucy’s response, beginning ‘Ile
114
Pearlman 1996, p. 22, n. 11.
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beare them hence’(TLN 2326) is, as Gaw points out, problematic on two counts. Not only does it needlessly repeat Charles’s phrase but also oddly repeats the exact phrasing of eight lines earlier: TLN 2319 reads ‘Give me their Bodyes, that I may beare them hence’. Lucy’s confusing repetition turns line 92 into an alexandrine that is made to rhyme with the regular pentameter of the following line:
Ile beare them hence: but from their ashes shal be reard A Phoenix that shall make all France affear’d. (TLN 2326–8)
Gaw concluded from his analysis of 4.7 that lines 60–90 were inserted by Shakespeare as late as 1599 and that the scene in its original conception was written entirely in rhymed couplets. 115 He failed, however, to notice that one of Talbot’s many titles listed by Lucy is ‘Lord Strange of Blackmere’ (4.7.65). As the previous chapter documented, the patron of the company which first performed harey the vj was Lord Strange, a descendant of the play’s protagonist, Lord Talbot. Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse, published in August 1592, was dedicated to Lord Strange and describes the same Lord Talbot triumphing on the stage. Accordingly, the reason why Talbot’s part in harey the vj was ‘elaborately amplified from the meagre record of the chronicles’ would seem to be that the playwrights were concerned to flatter the patron of the commissioning acting company. 116 Lucy’s lengthy tribute to Talbot (4.7.60–71) is
115 116
Gaw 1926, pp. 128, 146. Cairncross 1962, p. xl.
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therefore most likely as old as the play. Mincoff, without supplying any evidence, believed that the tribute belonged ‘obviously to the early stratum’—that is, 1592. 117 Dover Wilson suggests 4.7 was a basic text by Greene, Peele or Nashe touched up by Shakespeare before the original performances in 1592. 118 It is important to emphasise that 4.7 is the only scene in the play that Taylor, in ‘Shakespeare and Others’, believes to contain the work of more than one playwright, and that it comes immediately after a scene which had been completely rewritten and printed by mistake. I now cite Taylor’s revealing speculation on the genesis of this section of the play, which he considers shows evidence of ‘piecemeal adjustments’:
What we now see as a continuous scene—containing Talbot’s death, the entrance of the victorious French, and the arrival of Lucy—might originally have been planned as two scenes, which were subsequently welded together…The Folio provides no exit for the Englishmen who bring Talbot and his dead son on stage; though the French nobles and the audience see the bodies (lines 45–50), Lucy does not notice or identify them; when Joan identifies them for him, she describes them as “Stinking and fly-blown”— though Talbot died only forty-four lines before. Again, such inconsistencies do not amount to anything approaching proof of textual dislocation; but given the fact that something clearly did go wrong in the act-scene numbering hereabouts, suspicious minds may entertain the appropriate suspicion, and cautious heads will not be too dogmatic about the authorship of IV.vii.33–96, which might contain the work of two different writers. 119
117
Mincoff 1976, p. 84. Wilson 1952a, p. 186. 119 Taylor 1995, p. 171. 118
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Apart from the above remarks, Taylor avoids discussion of 4.7.33–96, a passage which is longer than any other scene of the Bordeaux sequence; he omits it from his final ‘division of shares’. It is hard to imagine that 4.7, a scene of just ninety-six lines, could contain the writing of Shakespeare as well as possibly two other playwrights without at least one of them having worked on it in the capacity of a reviser, especially when it is the climax of a sequence of scenes that exhibit extensive evidence of substantial revision. More than any other, this scene shows evidence of ‘textual dislocation’ in F and is clearly vital to our understanding of the genesis of 1 Henry VI. I shall return to it in Chapter 4, which conducts a full analysis of the bibliographical, linguistic, metrical, and stylistic evidence in F.
2.12 Conclusion A weight of corroborating evidence suggests that the whole of the original Bordeaux sequence was extensively yet incompletely revised in a process that in no way amounted to ‘piecemeal adjustments at a late stage of composition’. 120 My own cautious head, after examining the internal evidence, would argue that we should ‘not be too dogmatic’ about not only ‘the authorship of IV.vii.33–96’, but the authorship and chronology of the Bordeaux sequence (4.2–7) as a whole. Taylor fixes his can(n)on against post-1592 revision of 1 Henry VI without targeting the specific arguments of his most important predecessors. The present full structural analysis of the play has gone a long way towards revealing just why the vast majority of the play’s critics before Alexander were convinced that Shakespeare worked on the play solely in the capacity of a reviser and that he had nothing to do
120
Taylor 1995, p. 171
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with its original composition. Mincoff believed that the revision of the Bordeaux sequence took place about 1594 (Gaw insisted on 1599) and even Pearlman concedes the possibility that it took place some years after the original performances of harey the vj in 1592. We have seen in Chapter 1 that the plays of the Henry VI ‘trilogy’ had apparently not been performed consecutively at the Rose by one company as late as 1 February 1593, when the theatres were closed on account of plague. The earliest date we can be reasonably sure that one company owned all three plays is May 1594, upon the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s ‘duopoly’. 121 While there is no record of performances of 1 Henry VI after early 1593, the epilogue to Henry V (1598–9) refers to the Henry VI plays, ‘Which oft our stage has shown’, and that they were revived—and revised—when Henry V was first produced has been considered certain by Tucker Brooke and Gaw. 122 As Mincoff suggests after citing Nashe’s tribute in Pierce Penilesse:
Probably the [Bordeaux] episode is not preserved in the form in which Nashe saw it, and Shakespeare rewrote the sequence of scenes for a later revival, but obviously it was a highlight of the play in its first form. 123
My analysis has demonstrated that, in opposition to Taylor’s position, ‘theories of substantial revision, months or years after the original performances’ of the play should be taken seriously if we wish to give a thorough account of the genesis of 1 Henry VI. The play contains an exceptional number of continuity flaws, minor
121
See section 7 of Chapter 1 above. See Brooke 1918, pp. 133–7, 151–4; Gaw 1926, pp. 162–8. 123 Mincoff 1976, p. 19. 122
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contradictions, and unharmonised dramatisations of the source material, many of which only become visible when its structure is examined closely. In the conclusion to Chapter 1 I registered the possibility that it might be more accurate to talk of the ‘dates’ of 1 Henry VI rather than a singular ‘date’. My investigation here of revision theories associated with the play has transformed that possibility into a probability and cast significant doubt on Taylor’s claim that 2.4 and 4.2–4.7.32 of 1 Henry VI ‘are the most securely dated passages of early Shakespearean dramatic verse’.124 The remainder of this thesis seeks to synthesise the chronological and structural evidence presented thus far with the evidence preserved in the Folio text for the authorship of 1 Henry VI.
124
Taylor 1995, p. 184.
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3 RECONSTRUCTING THE COPY FOR 1 HENRY VI
Until the 1970s, the arbiters of bibliographical practice and those who formulated the principles that informed bibliographical studies were themselves active in the discipline: theory arose from praxis. When, however, separate interests in texts and textuality collided under the aegis of new critical theories, a different group of commentators on bibliographical studies came to the fore. There are bibliographers who have mediated between bibliographical and literary studies, preaching to the unconverted as it were: Fredson Bowers and G. T. Tanselle are ready examples. However, those to whom I refer are deeply grounded in critical theory and literary criticism and do not—although they may appear to do so the wide readership of non-bibliographers—attempt to transmit what is significant or new in bibliographical studies to a lay readership. They do not employ the language and concepts of bibliographical investigation to show the value of bibliographical studies for another disciplines, nor are they practitioners of the discipline. That is, we may say that they do not “profess” bibliography (which I use as a comprehensive term including textual criticism and the appropriate part of editing) but rather, criticism.
1
Thus begins Trevor Howard-Hill’s ‘Foul Papers: Narratives Old and New’, a paper given at the 1997 SSA Seminar. The paper was written primarily in response to Paul Werstine’s highly influential 1990 article ‘Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts: “Foul Papers” and “Bad” Quartos’, and in it Howard-Hill distils the Zeitgeist of
1 Trevor Howard-Hill, ‘Foul Papers: Narratives Old and New’ (paper given at the 1997 SSA Seminar). Hereafter cited as ‘Howard-Hill 1997’.
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Early Modern textual criticism at the end of the twentieth century. 2 As an ‘active’ bibliographer, he describes his experience of reading critics such as Stephen Orgel, Jonathan Goldberg, Margaret de Grazia, Marion Trousdale, and Meredith Skura as being akin to ‘hearing a harem eunuch discourse rapturously on the joys of sexual conversation’. 3 A brief discussion of Graham Holderness’s ‘bold, imaginative, and remarkably wide-ranging contribution to thought about the origins and presentation of Shakespeare’s text’, Textual Shakespeare: Writing and the Word (2003), will serve to illustrate how the intrinsic difference between ‘doing’ bibliography and ‘writing about’ it continues to be ignored in the early twenty-first century. 4 In Textual Shakespeare Holderness unveils what he considers to be cutting-edge textual theory, the supposed revelations of which have been recognised by practical bibliographers for more than a century. He sublimates the authorship and bibliography of Shakespearean texts into the ‘collective process of cultural production now widely acknowledged as the source of the drama, and whose precise causal configuration, and particular divisions of labour, remain to such a large extent hidden from us’. 5 As Howard-Hill observes of such abstractions, ‘it is not surprising then that critics who have not immersed themselves in the incontestable materialities of bibliographical investigation and who believe that reality is constituted by language, or factual truth by narrative strategies should misrepresent the present status of bibliographical
2
Paul Werstine, ‘Narratives about Printed Shakespeare Texts: “Foul Papers” and “Bad” Quartos’, SQ, 41 (1990), 65–86. Hereafter cited as ‘Werstine 1990’. 3 Howard-Hill 1997, p. 1. 4 Graham Holderness, Textual Shakespeare: Writing and the Word (Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2003). Hereafter cited as ‘Holderness 2003’. The cited endorsement is made by Stanley Wells on the book’s back cover. It is interesting that Wells, by writing ‘Shakespeare’s text’, reinforces the very authority Holderness seeks to undermine throughout his book. 5 Holderness 2003, p. 107.
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study—which they seek to define’. 6 Even a superficial survey of Shakespearean bibliographical scholarship furnishes ample proof that the ‘collective process of cultural production’ is today considerably less hidden from ‘active’ bibliographers than from critics of bibliography like Holderness. The differences between HowardHill and Holderness are as irreconcilable as those between an evolutionist and a creationist, but what matters is that the 1623 Shakespeare Folio text of 1 Henry VI is a material, finite reality, and that practising bibliographers have been able to shed considerable light on the nature of its genesis. Ultimately there is nothing in Textual Shakespeare that practising bibliographers like Howard-Hill have not known for decades. This chapter conducts a preliminary bibliographical analysis—not an adventitious theorisation of what Holderness calls a ‘post-bibliographic textual condition’—of the Folio text of 1 Henry VI, and evaluates in the process the different ways bibliographers and textual critics have reconstructed the nature of the manuscript copy that lies behind it. 7
3.1 Foul or Fair Copy? ‘The Folio text appears to have been set from foul papers’, writes Gary Taylor in the Oxford Textual Companion (1987), and his 1995 article, ‘Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part One’ expresses almost the same opinion. 8 The definition of ‘foul papers’, however, is the subject of an ongoing scholarly
6 Howard-Hill 1997, p. 2. Holderness spends twenty-odd pages of Textual Shakespeare (pp. 86–108) defending his Shakespearean Originals: First Editions (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992–6) series, the very title of which flies in the face of his theoretical framework. It is amusing to observe him arguing there for his own authorial authority over that of the publishers of the series. 7 Holderness 2003, p. 50. 8 TC, p. 217. See section 1 of Chapter 4 below for an analysis of the differences between Taylor’s 1987 and 1995 pronouncements.
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debate. In ‘Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts’, Werstine argues that W. W. Greg’s 1942 construction of foul papers was derived from a ‘purely ideal form of printer’s copy’ postulated by R. B. McKerrow in 1931. 9 But Werstine’s article is at best selective and at worst misleading, as Howard-Hill exposes in ‘Foul Papers’:
[Werstine’s article] forces modern scholarship in the Procrustean bed of McKerrow’s 1931–5 conception of foul papers as transmitted by Greg—as if no-one had thought about this topic since. The concern to demolish what is alleged to be Greg’s conception of foul papers is so strong that the relevance of more recently discovered manuscripts, the Arbury plays attributed to John Newdigate…and the Melbourne Hall manuscript of Webster’s The Duke of Florence is denied. At this point it seems as if [Werstine’s] main objective is to destroy the likelihood that any extant dramatic manuscript could be identified as foul papers. 10
It has been Fredson Bowers’s definition of foul papers—‘the author’s last complete draft in a shape satisfactory to him for transfer to fair copy’—Howard-Hill submits, and not Greg’s, that ‘has generally guided editors in the second half of the twentieth century’. 11 In light of Howard-Hill’s paper, it is not surprising that there have been many different explanations for the nature of the copy for 1 Henry VI. In 1926 Allison Gaw considered that ‘we may glance at the evidence in the First Folio…as to the nature and condition of the original manuscript’. His use of the verb ‘glance’ is unfortunate and in no way does justice to his ensuing survey of F, which was the most thorough
9 R. B. McKerrow, ‘The Elizabethan Printer and Dramatic Manuscripts’, in The Library, 4th ser., 12 (1931), 253– 75. 10 Howard-Hill 1997, p. 8. 11 Ibid. p. 14.
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then undertaken. While Fleay had been the first to notice the different spellings of some of the proper names in the text, Gaw looks longer and harder at F:
That the manuscript was (1) the regular theatrical prompt-book employed in the theatre and that it was (2) the work of men not in the habit themselves of conducting the rehearsals of their work, are both indicated by the fact that stage-directions concerning details of acting, costume, and stage-management, comparatively rare in the typical Shakespearean text, here occur frequently, and usually phrased without the crisp curtness of the practiced actor-playwright. (3) That it was in the original handwriting of the original authors is indicated by the fact that, as we shall see, differences in the spelling in the cases of certain proper names are so distributed and vary so consistently in accord with the content and literary traits of the passages in which the variants occur as to make it impossible that they should originate either with play-house transcribers or with printing-house compositors, but are explicable only on a basis of difference in authorial manuscript. (4) There is no indication of neglect to cancel a passage superseded by revisions…Similarly there is little indication of that method of revision that consists in rewriting brief passages on the margins of prompt-books. 12
Gaw certainly inherited Fleay’s flair for magisterial criticism. 13 His survey, although the most thorough at the time, is riddled with assumption and speculation. Chapter 2, which examined 1 Henry VI as a theatrical and literary production—not a bibliographical one—nevertheless uncovered sufficient evidence to disprove Gaw’s points (1) and (4).
12 13
Gaw 1926, pp. 64–5. See section 1 of Chapter 2 above.
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For nearly a century bibliographical scholars have sought to distinguish indicators of authorial copy from those of theatrical—or more specifically bookkeeper/prompter—origin. But Gaw took a different line in his theory for the copy of 1 Henry VI, and telescoped the putative stages between playwright’s quill and printer’s type by maintaining that the authors themselves included all of the necessary information for their manuscript to be used as a prompt-book. This may at first seem like an efficient wielding of Occam’s razor, but Gaw’s simplification does not tally with what we know of the transmission of playwrights’ manuscripts through the theatre to the printing house. 14 Moreover, no other critic, before or after Gaw, has reached the same conclusion about the copy for F. In 1942, Greg considered that the authorial manuscript behind 1 Henry VI had been annotated by the book-keeper and used by the prompter. 15 Editors John Dover Wilson (Cambridge Shakespeare, 1952), Gary Taylor (Oxford Complete Works, 1986), and Michael Hattaway (New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1990) are in rare agreement, however, that the copy could not have been used successfully as a promptbook. The following comments by Dover Wilson strongly challenge Greg’s hypothesis:
[Greg] makes no comment upon the striking variations in the form and spelling of character-names as they appear in different scenes; variations which would have puzzled anyone unacquainted with the chronicles, and, I should have thought, entirely baffling to someone trying to prompt from it during performance. Then there are those curious gaps
14 See MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘The Transmission of Shakespeare’s Text’ in Stanley Wells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge: CUP, 1986), pp. 163–85. 15 W. W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), p. 139, hereafter cited as ‘Greg 1942’, and later in The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliography and Textual History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 187.
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at 1.1.56 and 1.4.95 which must have been filled up in the players’ parts, to say nothing of a large number of hypermetrical or defective lines of verse, many of which would have been cured at a glance by a competent prompter of that age; blank verse being the element he lived in. It is true that the stage-directions at 2.1.7; 3.2.35; 4.1.181 bear traces, in my view, of his hand; but he would in any case have had to read through the draft before any fair copy was made, and notes jotted by prompters in the margin of “foul papers” are surely to be expected. 16
Quite apart from the extensive variation in character-names and the considerable number of irregular verse lines, Taylor shows in Textual Companion that on nine occasions entrances are omitted for characters, and it is probable that a further three entrances for soldiers were missing from the copy as well. 17 Properties are generally not specified: no mention is made of the rose bush central to the action of 2.4, or of the roses the characters wear in 3.1, 3.4, and 4.1. 18 Similarly the scroll called for in 3.1 is not specified in the stage directions. Both Dover Wilson and Taylor (in Textual Companion) concluded that the copy for F was annotated ‘foul papers’ and, as such, at an intermediate stage between ‘“normal” foul papers’ (Taylor’s phrase) and prompt-copy. They differ on who the annotator was, however: Dover Wilson believed that the prompter/book-keeper had jotted notes in the margins as he read through the draft, marking it up in preparation for a fair copy to be made, while Taylor believes one or more of the collaborators themselves did ‘a certain amount of stitching and reworking’ after ‘the separate foul
16 Wilson 1952a, p. 102. ‘Close on thirty [hypermetrical lines] and some twenty-five [metrically defective lines] have been counted’ (Ibid. n. 2). 17 TC, p. 217. 18 See Chapter 2, p. 115, n. 66 above. How the traditional act and scene divisions used here compare with those in F is explained below.
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papers had been combined’, and that there were ‘last-minute adjustments’. 19 Taylor does not make clear why the first editor(s) of the play were pressed for time. One assumes he is referring to the normal pressures that playwrights were under in Shakespeare’s time to produce plays quickly. But Taylor seems to make light of the fact that the copy for F was over thirty years old when it was printed. We cannot possibly be certain that no agent, whether authorial or theatrical, made some ‘adjustments’ between 1592 and 1623. As I established in Chapter 2, F exhibits extensive evidence of substantial revision having been carried out in Act 2 (the insertion of 2.4) and Act 4 (the thorough but incomplete revision of the Bordeaux sequence (4.2–7)), some time after the first performances of harey the vj in 1592. I showed there that the role of Sir William Lucy in 4.3, 4.4, and in particular 4.7, would have required more than a ‘few piecemeal adjustments’ before those scenes could have been played successfully. Taylor is keenly aware of the fate of Dover Wilson’s criticism, whose ‘lifelong obsession’ with theories of revision and ‘continuous copy’ obscured and continues to obscure his considerable contribution to Shakespeare scholarship. 20 But despite Taylor’s distancing of himself from Dover Wilson in ‘Shakespeare and Others’, it is important to realise that the latter would have agreed in principle with Taylor’s position—Dover Wilson’s theory of ‘substantial revision’ also held that the 1623 copy for F preserved the play as it was first performed in 1592. 21 Hattaway writes the following in the ‘Textual Analysis’ section near the end of his 1990 New Cambridge edition of 1 Henry VI:
19
Wilson 1952a, p. 102–3; TC, p. 217–8. Taylor 1995, p. 169; Chambers 1924, pp. 42–5. 21 Wilson 1952a, pp. xlviii–l . 20
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The text of a Renaissance play was subject to alteration or corruption at up to seven stages: by the author (or authors) while still in preliminary drafts; by authors or scribes preparing a “fair copy” for delivery to a company; by an adapter connected with the company by whom it was being performed; by the book-holder (who doubled as a prompter) annotating the foul papers or preparing a copy for performance; by an editor preparing copy for the printer; by the compositors; and by the proof-reader. It is logical to look for evidence of changes of these kinds in reverse order and so produce a theory about the nature of the copy used by the compositors who turned the manuscript into the printed texts that survive. A theory of the history of this copy is a prerequisite to the investigation of revision and authorship: John Dover Wilson, who was a notable “disintegrator”, did not have a theory of the text, and derived his theory of copy from his theory of collaboration and revision. 22
This paragraph is theoretically sound, advocating as it does an editorial analysis that takes into account the contingencies involved at every stage of the transmission of a Renaissance play-text. Indubitably, ‘[a] theory of the history of the copy is a prerequisite to the investigation of revision and authorship’. At this point, however, Hattaway’s argument starts to lose credibility. He claims that the ‘notable “disintegrator”’ Dover Wilson ‘did not have a theory of the text’. 23 This statement is palpably false. Dover Wilson may not have had Hattaway’s theory of the text, but he most certainly had a theory of the text. 24 In ‘The Copy For 1 Henry VI 1623’ section of his edition, Dover Wilson immediately expresses his theory:
22
Hattaway 1990, p. 187. It is unclear exactly what Hattaway means here by ‘a theory of the text’—‘theory’ and ‘text’ being such loaded terms. 24 Hattaway himself cites pp. 102–7 of Wilson’s edition which explicitly outline his theory of the text. 23
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The thirty-one years between the production of this play in 1592 and its publication in 1623 is a long period for a MS. to lie undisturbed in the theatre ‘book’ room, yet everything about the F. text leads me to believe that it was printed from the actual draft supplied by the authors for its performance at the Rose on 3 March of the earlier year. 25
It is remarkable how few and cursory Hattaway’s citations of Dover Wilson’s edition in general are, when they are, after all, consecutive editors for the Cambridge Shakespeare series. It seems that Hattaway considers the labelling of Dover Wilson as ‘a notable “disintegrator”’ sufficient to make a thorough citation of his arguments for the composition of 1 Henry VI unnecessary. He believes that Dover Wilson had wrongly worked back from his theory of collaboration and revision for the genesis of 1 Henry VI to a theory of the copy for F (but not a ‘theory of the text’, apparently). One can, however, justify the similar neglect of Hattaway’s own authorship and textual hypotheses by pointing out that they exhibit the same flaw as he claims to have found in Dover Wilson’s. In his ‘Note On The Text’, which comes immediately before the ‘List of Characters’ and the play proper, Hattaway writes: ‘The nature and provenance of F—it derives basically from Shakespeare’s manuscript—are discussed in the Textual Analysis…below’. 26 If Dover Wilson was a notable ‘disintegrator’, Hattaway’s edition quickly reveals him to be a notable ‘absolutist’. In his barely two-page treatment of the authorship of the play, Hattaway announces ‘I do not feel inclined to dispute the implicit claim, made by Heminges and Condell when they included the play in the First Folio, that 1 Henry VI is
25 26
Wilson 1952a, p. 102. Hattaway 1990, p. 58.
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Shakespeare’s work’. 27 Should we, as twenty-first century readers of Shakespeare, be convinced by an authorship hypothesis based on nothing more than a personal inclination and a faith in ‘implicit’ claims made by men who cannot be proved to have known Shakespeare at the time 1 Henry VI was composed? 28 By neglecting to mention that the vast majority of studies devoted to the authorship of the play have denied Shakespeare’s sole responsibility for it, Hattaway seeks to make the authorship issue a non-issue and goes on to imply that in the end it does not really matter who wrote 1 Henry VI: ‘And even if it could be proved that the play was in whole or in part not by Shakespeare, should that affect the way we read or direct it?’ 29 This question represents a flirtation with the school of thought pioneered by Roland Barthes that seeks to place the author at the vanishing point of his own textual landscape. It is a flirtation because every other aspect of Hattaway’s edition is founded upon the conviction that Shakespeare and only Shakespeare wrote 1 Henry VI, and indeed the other Henry VI plays as well. The whole fabric of his editorial introduction is woven on a loom which he takes for granted Shakespeare designed. Hattaway’s question is intended to challenge the validity of scholarship that insists on the importance of knowing ‘who wrote what’ by suggesting that it is ultimately pointless to ask such a question. At the same time he seems completely unaware that the assumption which his edition is founded on—that Shakespeare was the sole author of the play—affects at every turn the way he reads 1 Henry VI and how he is directing others to read it.
27
Ibid. p. 43. ‘The Chamberlain’s Men are first mentioned in June 1594; Shakespeare and Burbage are identified as leading members in March 1595; Heminges in December 1596; Condell in 1598 [Chambers 1923, ii, 192–7]. If we assume that Heminges and Condell were members of the Chamberlain’s Men from the company’s inception, we can push their association with Shakespeare back to 1594–95’ (Taylor 1995, p. 199, n. 12). 29 Hattaway 1990, p. 43. 28
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Hattaway’s comparatively lengthy ‘Textual Analysis’ (it is four times longer than his ‘Authorship’ section) follows—not precedes—his summary judgement on the play’s authorship, and assumes from the outset that Shakespeare was the sole author of the printer’s copy for 1 Henry VI. Because he is working from and not towards the conclusion that only one authorial hand wrote the manuscript that was set into type, he consistently attributes the spelling inconsistencies in the text to compositorial interference. His presentation of the inconsistencies is far from comprehensive, however, and he considers Charlton Hinman’s identification of the compositorial stints in 1 Henry VI to account for the ‘spelling inconsistencies that seemed to earlier scholars to point to manuscript copy, either produced by more than one hand or written by more than one author’. 30 In 1963 Hinman established that 1 Henry VI was, like all of the Folio histories, set by two compositors whom he designated ‘A’ and ‘B’. By cataloguing the distribution of different spellings in F and tracing individual pieces of type, Hinman was able to assign Compositor A, who worked from case ‘x’ and Compositor B, who worked from case ‘y’, the following stints, which are listed in Table 1 on the next page:
30 Hattaway 1990, p. 188; Charlton Hinman, The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), ii, 33–57.
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Table 1: Hinman’s identification of compositorial stints in the Folio 1 Henry VI
Compositor Stint Folio Pagination Through Line Number (TLN) Traditional Division
Ax set k2v–k5a
96–101a
1–673
1.1.1–1.6.31
By set k5b
101b
674–728
2.1.1–2.1.44
Ax set k5v–l3
102–9
729–1742
2.1.45–3.4.45
By set l3v–l4
110–12
1743–2125
4.1.1–4.5.12
Ax set l5
113
2126–2253
4.5.13–4.7.22
By set l5v–m2
114–19
2254–2931
4.7.23–5.5.108
After a selective discussion designed to smooth over the textual inconsistencies in F, Hattaway manages to conclude that the text was set from Shakespeare’s holographic fair copy. 31 No other major editor of the play has reached the same conclusion. The extensive evidence of the thorough yet incomplete revision of harey the vj analysed in Chapter 2 is sufficient in itself to refute such an explanation for the copy behind 1 Henry VI. Taylor shows in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ (which Hattaway had read in an unpublished form) that compositorial interference does not satisfactorily account for all of the textual inconsistencies and the pattern of their distribution in F. Unlike Hattaway, Taylor presents his textual analysis before his authorship hypothesis, both of which will be fully appraised in the following chapter. 32 Apart from Andrew Cairncross, all major editors of 1 Henry VI in the last fifty years agree that the copy for F was essentially written in the authorial hand(s). Cairncross, who edited the Arden2 edition published in 1962, was, as Hattaway
31 32
Hattaway 1990, p. 195. Taylor himself erred like Hattaway in TC, p. 217.
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observes, a scholar whose ‘turn of mind was Augustan and his desire for metrical regularity and rhetorical order led him to postulate the existence of [a] scribe’. 33 Writing in Textual Companion, Taylor speculates on why Cairncross felt the need to emend the Folio text so heavily:
Cairncross’s textual hypothesis depended upon, and had the effect of reinforcing, his belief that Shakespeare wrote the entire play: given the poverty of much of the writing, this belief could only be sustained by a corresponding assumption that the Folio text in many places seriously misrepresents the play’s intended verbal texture. 34
Cairncross believed that his many emendations reconstructed a text that more closely reflected Shakespeare’s original authorial intentions; intentions which had been obscured by an ‘improving’ scribe’s intervention. That no one had ever felt the need to postulate scribal copy before and that his hypothesis has been universally rejected by the subsequent Arden, Oxford, and Cambridge editors would seem to confirm Taylor’s suggestion that Cairncross was compelled to invent a scribe in order to reconfigure F to fit his authorial hypothesis and his own conception of Shakespeare. Like Hattaway, Cairncross developed a textual hypothesis out of his authorial one, instead of vice-versa.
3.2 The Folio Act and Scene Divisions
33 34
Hattaway 1990, p. 193. TC, p. 217.
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The act and scene divisions in F have generated much debate. 35 F marks Actus Primus and Actus Secundus, but includes no scene divisions. Actus Tertius is marked and divided into four scenes. Here is where things get complicated: Actus Quartus is divided into three scenes, is roughly twice as long as each of the preceding acts, and includes all of the rest of the play except the final 108 lines. These lines are isolated in F as Actus Quintus, which is a mere one-tenth of the preceding act’s length. Accordingly, when Taylor states that ‘only in acts 3 and 5 does the Folio text mark scene divisions’, he is incorrect. 36 He may be confusing F’s Actus Quintus (the last 108 lines of the play) with the divided Act 5 of traditionally-divided editions which I defined at the beginning of Chapter 1. In F only Actus Tertius and Actus Quartus are divided into scenes; Actus Quintus stands alone, without the Scena Prima which had followed every other act division. To make things as clear as possible, the table on the following page compares the original F divisions with the traditional editorial divisions and those employed in the Oxford Complete Works edition. The curious division of acts and scenes in F has been explained in many different ways. Gaw believed that F’s original division had been ‘more misrepresented in the modern editions than is the case with any other Shakespearean play’, and concluded, as we saw above, that F’s haphazard marking of acts and scenes stemmed from both heterogeneous authorial copy and extensive revision of what was originally a four-act play. 37 Greg found support for his prompt-copy hypothesis in the marking of acts in F but had to admit that ‘the act division is very irregular’ and ‘may
35
Taylor 1995, pp. 177–8. Ibid. p. 156. 37 Gaw 1926, p. 34. 36
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Table 2: Act and scene divisions in the Folio, traditional editions, and the Oxford Complete Works (1986) Folio
Traditional
Oxford Complete Works
Act 1
Act 1
[Six scenes marked]
[Eight scenes marked]
Act 2
Act 2
[Five scenes marked]
[Five scenes marked]
Act 3, scene 1
Act 3
Scæna Secunda
scene 2
[Eight scenes marked]
Scæna Tertia
scene 3
Scæna Quarta
scene 4
Actus Primus. Scæna Prima
Actus Secundus. Scena Prima
Actus Tertius. Scena Prima
Actus Quartus. Scena Prima
Scena secunda Scæna Tertia
Act 4
Act 4
[Seven scenes marked]
[Seven scenes marked]
Act 5, scene 1
Act 5
scene 2
[Seven scenes marked]
scene 3 scene 4 Actus Quintus
scene 5
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have survived from the original or at least earlier form of the play’. 38 Dover Wilson considers that ‘it is at least conceivable’ that Robert Greene, who, he maintained, was the original plotter of the play, ‘arranged the material to be worked up under acts and scenes as a matter of convenience’. He then suggests that:
the playbook when originally completed was divided into five acts, since four of them are there in the F. text. For a similar reason it looks as if in act 3 at any rate all the scenes were marked, while the isolated “Scena secunda”, “Scæna Tertia” in what is now called act 5, suggests that the last act was once marked in scenes also. 39
Once Dover Wilson ‘conceives’ of a solution for an editorial problem he is like a dog with a bone: conjecture proliferates and his conviction that he has uncovered not just a conceivable explanation but the explanation for the problem before him becomes unshakeable. From the above suspect reasoning he goes on to argue that the reason Actus Tertius is divided into scenes is because Greene wrote it and because Shakespeare’s revision of the whole play ‘disturbed’ those scenes least. Such a scenario is ‘natural’. 40 Dover Wilson was apparently unaware that not one of the printed texts of Greene’s plays includes scene divisions and that only one, Alphonsus, King of Aragon, includes (confused) act divisions. 41 When considered separately from his authorship hypothesis, his discussion of the F divisions in the latter part of the play is more convincing:
38
Wilson 1952a, p. 103; Greg 1942, p. 139. Wilson 1952a, p. 102. Ibid. p. 104. 41 Verified using Literature Online. 39 40
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[A disturbance in transmission] has jettisoned the Actus Quintus, Scena Prima also, since the ludicrous Actus Quintus at the head of our editorial act 5, sc. 5 can only be a despairing gesture on the part of the F. compositor, who failing to find any actus to follow on the four already marked, decided that the final scene, presumably labelled “scena quinta” (or merely “5”) in his copy, must be what he sought. Clearly, too, as Pollard likewise pointed out, the scenes which the compositor marks “Scena secunda” and “Scæna Tertia”…once stood as the second and third scenes of Actus Quintus. Those responsible for F.2 were so persuaded of this that they introduced the heading Actus Quintus, Scena Prima, at 4.7.33, i.e. immediately following the death of Talbot. The difficulty of this is that, as ll. 45–6 show, what comes next is continuous in action with what went before. It is indeed impossible now to detect where the original act 5 commenced… 42
Taylor observes that editors since Capell have assumed that the original first scene of Act 5 is lost (not just the heading Actus Quintus, Scena Prima) and have accordingly renumbered F’s ‘Scena secunda’ of Act 4 as 5.1. 43 The Oxford Complete Works edition follows Capell, ‘with misgiving, on the assumption that the original structural intention is irrecoverable, due to revision or the loss of a scene’. As section 8 of Chapter 2 demonstrated, Taylor was more tolerant of revision having played a part in the genesis of 1 Henry VI in Textual Companion than he is in ‘Shakespeare and Others’. As both his 1987 and 1995 hypotheses for the authorship and date of the play otherwise insist that only ‘piecemeal adjustments’ were made to the manuscript—at a date immediately prior to the first performances in 1592—it is easy to overlook this admission that revision significant enough to obscure the ‘original structural
42 43
Wilson 1952a, pp. 104–5. TC, p. 218.
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intention’ of the play may well have occurred. Again as the previous chapter made clear, it is far more probable that the bibliographical oddities of 4.7 (which comes just before F’s Scena secunda of Actus Quartus, the traditional and Oxford 5.1); the glaring inconsistencies caused by the ‘troublesome afterthought’ Lucy, and the intended replacement of 4.6 by 4.5 originated from the substantial revision of the Bordeaux sequence, rather than from piecemeal adjustment. None of the recent investigations into the act and scene divisions in F take into account the characteristically insightful remarks of Marco Mincoff in The First Steps:
Whether the act divisions of the Folio are really Shakespeare’s is…an open question; but they have been placed with singularly little regard to logic, and they give the play an even more straggling appearance than need be. It does fall quite easily into five sections, but these sections have nothing do with the acts of the Folio. 44
He notes that at the end of F’s Actus Primus the action runs straight on into Actus Secundus with the unhistorical recapture of Orléans by Talbot and his men and thought ‘that is surely Shakespeare’s intention, to finish his act with an English victory’ (at the end of the traditional 2.1). No other critic has suggested this and one is always on thin critical ice reconstructing authorial intentions, but Mincoff’s train of thought is certainly worth pursuing. He argues that Act 2 should extend to the end of 3.1, with Exeter’s choric prophecy of doom, and similarly that Act 3 should extend to
44
Mincoff 1976, p. 23.
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the end of the traditional 4.1, at which point Exeter again acts as chorus. 45 One can easily see the dramaturgical logic behind Mincoff’s suggestions, especially if the break between Acts 3 and 4 did not interrupt the ceremonies as it does in F and traditional editions and instead came just before the action switches to Bordeaux. Interestingly, the only act break which Mincoff thought falls appropriately is that between the traditional Acts 4 and 5, which is the only one Taylor has misgivings over. Even more interesting is the fact that no other recent critic has approached the act and scene divisions in F from the dramaturgical angle. In Textual Companion Taylor does, however, use the word ‘literary’ in his discussion:
The act divisions seem to be literary rather than theatrical in origin. The public theatres seem not to have made use of intervals between the acts before c. 1609, and the copy for F seems in any case not to have undergone theatrical annotation. 46
From the context it would seem that Taylor is using ‘literary’ to mean ‘authorial’ and suggesting that it was the playwright or playwrights who were responsible for the marking of the act divisions in F, not a theatrical agent like a book-keeper, for example, after the manuscript had left authorial hands. He goes on to say that his ‘division of authorial shares broadly reflects the act divisions, which may well reflect the collaborators’ efforts to note the place of their own contribution in a predetermined structure’. 47 The next chapter fully appraises Taylor’s authorial division of the play between four playwrights; here it suffices to say that the ‘literary’
45
Ibid. pp. 25–6. TC, p. 218. 47 Ibid. 46
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or dramaturgically logical act divisions suggested by Mincoff are certainly worth bearing in mind when investigating ‘who wrote what’ in 1 Henry VI. In a wide variety of perplexing, complicated ways, the Folio 1 Henry VI seems to frustrate the construction of a single, authoritative hypothesis concerning the nature of the copy behind it. Its uniquely baffling act and scene divisions further muddy the already clouded waters. Perhaps the best way to hypothesise what the copy was is to summarise what it was not. The exceptional bibliographical and dramaturgical inconsistencies of the Folio text—which have only been introduced here and which will be fully explored in the next chapter—make it unlike any other play-text thought to have been set from holographic fair copy, which is Hattaway’s conclusion—and simplification—of the problem. It is as misleading to conflate what we know of the roles of playwright and book-keeper in the Elizabethan theatre as Gaw did as it is to invent a scribe and then set about restoring the only authoritative text of the play to how Shakespeare intended it to be, as Cairncross did. The most recent major editors of the play, Edward Burns (Arden3, 2000) and Michael Taylor (Oxford, 2003) do not see the need to re-examine the evidence after Gary Taylor’s pronouncement and both devote considerably less space in their introductions to the problem than Hattaway did. 48 Indeed Burns does not use the word ‘copy’ at all and casts his remarks in the conditional tense: ‘If F’s 1 Henry VI is based on a collaborative manuscript including sections by Shakespeare, those sections may well have looked like this’ [the reader is referred to Burns’s Fig. 9, a page from the collaborative manuscript of Sir Thomas More by Hand D, thought to be Shakespeare]. 49 Given Burns’s complete avoidance of
48 49
Burns 2000, pp. 79–84. Ibid. p. 80.
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specifics with regard to the copy for F, the fact that he does not describe the possible collaborative manuscript behind F as ‘foul papers’ may not necessarily mean that he is aware of the problematic nature of the term. Michael Taylor, while he does at least quickly review the major twentieth-century arguments, defers completely to his namesake:
The last word on this issue should be given to the Textual Companion: “all the features of the Folio text are most economically explained by the hypothesis that the copy was collaborative foul papers, containing last-minute adjustments; there is no need to suspect intervention by scribe or book-keeper”. 50
In the interests of sound scholarly procedure, I have approached this investigation into the nature of the copy for F with no preconceived assumptions about its origin. We have seen Hattaway accuse Dover Wilson of developing a hypothesis for the copy behind F from his authorship hypothesis and then proceed to do exactly the same thing himself. This preliminary analysis has established that the copy used for 1 Henry VI was exceptional in many complicated ways; the next chapter will delineate these, showing in the process how the copy differed from that used for all the other plays in the Shakespeare First Folio. That the manuscript used was authorial in origin, and not scribal, not a prompt-book, and clearly not a fair copy, is the best interpretation of the textual evidence examined thus far.
50
TC, p. 218.
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4 AND THEN THERE WERE THREE: CRITIQUING TAYLOR’S DIVISIONS OF SHARES
In the Oxford Textual Companion (1987), Gary Taylor begins his discussion of 1 Henry VI in the following manner:
The traditional view, that Part One is a collaborative work written later than the other two plays on the reign of Henry VI, has been restated by Gary Taylor, who provides new evidence of multiple authorship (“Shakespeare and Others”). Taylor proposes the following division of shares:
1.1.1–102/102
Y? (or X)
1.1.103–151/103–51
?
1.1.152–77/152–77
Y? (or X)
1.2.–1.8/Sc. 2–8
Thomas Nashe
2.1–2.3/Sc. 9–11
X
2.4/Sc. 12
Shakespeare
2.5/Sc. 13
X
3.1–3.8/Sc. 14–21
Y
4.1/Sc. 22
X? (or Y)
4.2–4.7.32/Sc. 23–8, 2049
Shakespeare
4.7.33–96/2050–2113
mixed? (Shakespeare and Y?)
5.1–end/Sc. 29–end
Y
163
The ‘new evidence of multiple authorship’ behind Taylor’s ‘division of shares’ was not in fact published for another eight years. 1 This extraordinarily long hiatus between hypothesis and supporting evidence has no precedent in the play’s criticism. Without question, the Oxford Complete Works (1986) is a monumental achievement, but it is not without its faults, to which other leading Shakespearean scholars drew attention in their reviews. 2 Some of that criticism was unreasonable. With respect to 1 Henry VI however, it was Taylor and his fellow editors who were unreasonable to expect their readers to accept the validity of a new authorship hypothesis for the play without presenting any evidence for it. 1995 saw the publication of Taylor’s lengthy article ‘Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part One’, and his ‘new evidence’, which had spent eight years in a ‘forthcoming’ limbo, was finally made public. The quality of Taylor’s evidence however, and the methodology he employs to construct his authorship hypothesis, secure his unconditional pardon: for the first time the hypothesis that Shakespeare did not write all of 1 Henry VI was put beyond reasonable doubt. 3 In stark contrast to his earlier modus operandi, Taylor’s methodology in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ is the most professional, objective, and incisive ever applied to the twin problems of the play’s authorship and date. A comprehensive appraisal of Taylor’s work on 1 Henry VI has yet to be published, a gap that the present chapter is intended to fill. Next to the hypotheses of his predecessors, whether for or against Shakespeare’s sole authorship of the play,
1
TC, p. 217. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, general eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). See the reviews by David Bevington, SQ, 38 (1987), 501–19, and Brian Vickers, RES, 40 (1989), 402–11. 3 No critic has been able to shake Taylor’s fundamental demonstration that the play is a collaborative work. J. J. M. Tobin’s curious attempt is discussed in section 1 of Chapter 5. 2
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Taylor’s is so far superior as to make comparison seem pointless. Nevertheless, a close analysis of ‘Shakespeare and Others’ reveals, albeit to a much lesser extent, the same faults of inaccuracy and confusion of supposition and fact which have plagued accounts of the genesis of 1 Henry VI for centuries. New evidence is presented here further cementing the hypothesis that Shakespeare was not solely responsible for the Folio text. The extent to which the other authors who worked on the play can be identified is the concern of the following chapter. I deliberately avoid labelling Shakespeare a ‘collaborator’ in this thesis because, as the foregoing chapters have established, we have no way of determining exactly when he worked on the play and in what capacity. Chapter 2 has cast significant doubt on Taylor’s assumption that the manuscript behind the harey the vj first performed at the Rose on 3 March 1592 was printed essentially verbatim in 1623.
4.1 Taylor’s Two Divisions In ‘Shakespeare and Others’ Taylor concludes that all of Act 1 and only Act 1 was written by Thomas Nashe. In Textual Companion however, as we have seen above, he divides the first scene of the play into three sections with a curious blend of certainty and uncertainty. The ‘new evidence’ for these particular attributions remains unpublished to this day. After Act 1, the two divisions of shares are more or less consonant: in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ the former X becomes ‘W’, who now definitely authored 4.1 when originally Y might have, while the possibility that Shakespeare wrote some of 4.7.33–96 evaporates. Despite these and other important differences between his two pronouncements on 1 Henry VI, Taylor gives no indication in the later study that he has modified his original hypothesis for the 165
authorship of the play. Early on in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ he refers his readers to Textual Companion and his discussion there of the nature of the copy for F. This discussion, he tells us in the later study, concluded that ‘the printer’s copy for the Folio text was annotated authorial papers’. 4 But this is not entirely correct: sometime between 1987 and 1995 the adjective ‘foul’ dropped out of Taylor’s description of the copy for F, a highly significant omission in the context of the ongoing debate over the validity of the term ‘foul papers’ discussed in the previous chapter. The first and most important thing to make absolutely clear when examining a text in order to construct an authorship hypothesis is how one intends to reference that text. In Textual Companion Taylor fully discusses the editorial ramifications of the act and scene divisions ‘apparently [being] left incoherent in the foul papers’, but in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ he does not. The previous chapter’s analysis of the act and scene divisions in F demonstrated the inaccuracy of Taylor’s statement in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ that F marks scene divisions only in Acts 3 and 5. 5 He confuses F’s Actus Quintus (the last 108 lines of the play) with the traditionallydivided Act 5. In F only Actus Tertius and Actus Quartus are divided into scenes; Actus Quintus, unlike the first four acts, is not even accompanied by a ‘Scæna Prima’. Editors since Capell have agreed, with regard to the puzzling act and scene divisions in the last two acts in F, that the Scena secunda and Scæna Tertia of Actus Quartus can most reasonably be read as indicating scene divisions in an intended Act 5, rather than Act 4. Capell’s decision to mark the Scena secunda of Actus Quartus ‘5.1’ is the
4 5
Taylor 1995, p. 199, n. 8. Ibid. p. 156.
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most common-sensical solution to the problem in the circumstances; nearly every subsequent editor of the play has followed his lead. In ‘Shakespeare and Others’, in contrast to Textual Companion, Taylor does not make clear that the act and scene divisions he uses to divide 1 Henry VI between four authors are different from those originally marked in F. It has made most sense to almost every editor of the play since Capell to think of Act 5 as beginning at F’s Scena Secunda of Actus Quartus. This is not a recent innovation of ‘disintegrationists’ to facilitate their hypotheses of collaborative authorship. I agree with Capell and most of the play’s editors and critics that the best approximation of where the author(s) of the play intended Act 5 to begin is at F’s Scena Secunda of Actus Quartus. I refer to the Folio acts exclusively by their Latin names and all act-scene-line references (for example: 2.1.20) are keyed to Hattaway’s New Cambridge edition. Hattaway is staunchly convinced of Shakespeare’s sole authorship of the play and therefore brought no ‘disintegrationist’ bias to his editing of the text. As in the previous chapters, Charlton Hinman’s Through-Line-Numbers (TLN) are used whenever F is cited. With my frames of reference established, it is now time to start assessing Taylor’s long-delayed evidence for the multiple authorship of 1 Henry VI by completing the full bibliographical analysis begun in the previous chapter.
4.2 Name Calling in 1 Henry VI One of the foundations of Fleay’s authorship hypothesis for 1 Henry VI is the distribution of different spellings of proper names in F. Taylor, like Fleay, Gaw, and Dover Wilson before him, considers significant the variation in the spelling of Joan of Arc’s sobriquet, which today takes the form ‘Pucelle’, meaning ‘Maid’ or ‘Virgin’. 167
From the beginning of the play up to and including 2.1, there are twenty-three instances of her epithet beginning with the stem ‘Puz-’ and none with the stem ‘Puc-’. The appellation does not appear again until 3.2, and from that point to the end of the play there are forty-six occurrences of the stem ‘Puc-’ only—‘Puz-’ does not appear at all after 2.1. 6 As both compositors set both forms of the epithet, the pattern cannot be compositorial in origin. 7 What can we deduce from this distribution? The first scene of Act 2 is noteworthy on two counts. Firstly it exhibits the only instance of ‘Puzell’, with two ‘l’s in the play and the only occurrence of the stem ‘Puz-’ outside Act 1. The doubling of the last letter could however easily be compositorial, being a very common type of error. In 1952 Dover Wilson pointed out that the solitary ‘Puzell’ is a pun in the dialogue, which may have influenced the spelling. 8 Secondly, 2.1 is the only scene in which the speech prefix ‘Ioane’ is used (twice) and the only scene in which ‘Ioane’ by itself appears in a stage direction (TLN 733). These peculiarities are not so easily explained away and will be revisited in section 8 below. 9 Taylor remarks that:
Since the name appears nowhere else in act 2, one might legitimately claim that act 2 is as uniquely consistent in its treatment of the nomenclature of this character as is act 1.
6 Taylor 1995, p. 155. Taylor’s total of twenty-five instances of the ‘Puz-’ stem in the body text appears to include the two ‘Ioane’ speech prefixes in 2.1: twenty-three is the correct total. He also errs on the total of the ‘Puc-’ variants, claiming that there are forty-two in the text when in reality there are forty-six. The one instance of the prefix ‘Pue’ at TLN 2716 is probably a misreading of ‘Puc’, and the unique ‘Pu’ at TLN 2726 appears in a tightly justified line where the compositor was pressed for space. Taylor’s inaccuracies in no way affect the significance of the distribution of the ‘Puz-’ and ‘Puc-’ stems in F. 7 Hattaway decided Shakespeare changed his spelling (Hattaway 1990, p. 188, n. 5). As the previous chapter made clear, of the recent editors of 1 Henry VI only Cairncross decided that the copy for F was scribal as opposed to authorial in origin. With Taylor I can find no compelling evidence of ‘scribal sophistication’ in F. 8 Wilson 1952a, p. 105. 9 ‘Ioane’ appears by itself in the body text only at TLN 734; 2.1.49 and TLN 1602; 3.3.17.
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Unfortunately, in act 1 this discrepancy rests upon twenty-two pieces of evidence; in act 2, upon only four. 10
If by ‘the name’ Taylor means Joan’s epithet, he is correct. He overlooks, however, that the unique ‘Ioane of Acre’ appears at TLN 791; 2.2.20. A further inconsistency in the nomenclature of Joan of Arc, apparently compositorial in origin, goes unmentioned by Taylor at this stage of his discussion. 11 Fleay observed that the spelling ‘Ione’ appears just nine times in the play, all in what F marks Actus Quartus, Scœna Tertia, some 419 lines (TLN 2399–2818). This passage is marked 5.2–4 in the traditional division. Compositor B, who set all of this section, did not encounter any form of the Christian name elsewhere in his copy and could conceivably have changed the manuscript’s ‘Ioane’s to ‘Ione’s. If we subtract the 150 lines dedicated to Suffolk’s wooing of Margaret (TLN 2481–2639; 5.3.45–195), we see that in just 269 lines, ‘Ione’ appears once by itself in a stage direction (TLN 2399; 5.2.0 SD) and six times by itself in the main body of the text. 12 Recall that the only time ‘Ioane’ appears by itself in a stage direction is at TLN 733; 2.1.48 SD. The only instance of ‘Ione of Aire’ in the play is encountered at TLN 2689; 5.4.49. Dover Wilson and Hattaway thought that the unique ‘Ioane of Acre’ at TLN 791; 2.2.20 identified above might have resulted from the compositor’s i/c misreading of ‘Aire’. 13 A slight connection between Acts 2 and 5 is established by this bibliographical evidence, but the marked
10
Taylor 1995, p. 155. Much later in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ (p. 173), Taylor does show his awareness of the ‘Ione’ spelling occurring in F but does not discuss it in connection with the distribution of the ‘Ioane’ spellings. 12 Gaw 1926, p. 148. 13 Wilson 1952a, p. 141; Hattaway 1990, p. 102. ‘Holinshed introduces Joan as Ione de Are, Pusell de Dieu, although Boswell-Stone consistently quotes the Holinshed passage with the form Arc. It is possible that at V, iv, 49, the writer actually wrote Aire for Are, and that at II, ii, 2, Acre was a printer’s misreading for Aire’ (Gaw 1926, p. 71, n. 12). 11
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division between the occurrences of the ‘Puz-’ and ‘Puc-’ stems strongly suggests that with regard to the part of Joan of Arc, the Folio compositors were working from heterogeneous copy. The different ways the name of Reignier, Duke of Anjou and father of Margaret, is spelled in the Folio are worthy of discussion. Apart from one instance of ‘Reynold’ at TLN 105; 1.1.94 and one of ‘Reignard’ at TLN 2091; 4.4.27, the character is referred to in the body text as either ‘Reignier’ or ‘Reigneir’. We have seen in Chapter 2 that historically Reignier took no part in the events described in 1.2, 2.2, and 3.1, where he joins the French nobles and Joan fighting against the English. In the chronicles he is not mentioned until Margaret is introduced during the negotiations for Henry VI’s marriage, and Taylor, in Textual Companion, but not in ‘Shakespeare and Others’, considers that inconsistencies in the stage directions of 3.2 suggest Reignier’s part in the traditional Acts 1–4 may have been an after-thought. His unaccountable disappearance between 3.2 and 3.3 would seem to corroborate this. The possibility that Reignier’s speeches in the first four acts were originally distributed among the other French nobles is supported by the similarity between 1.1’s ‘Reynold’ (ostensibly the first mention of Reignier) and ‘Veignold’, a French leader at Orléans mentioned by Halle and Grafton. Dover Wilson considers ‘Reynold’ a ‘hasty misreading’ of ‘Veignold’. 14 The unique ‘Reignard’ could be related to the ‘Reynard’ found at V.vii.38 of 3 Henry VI. 15 Certainly, the character of Reignier is difficult to pin down
14 Wilson 1952a, p. 106; Halle, p. 145; Richard Grafton, A Chronicle at Large of the History of the Affayres of England (1569, repr. in 2 vols., 1809), i., p. 577. 15 It should be noted here that ‘Reignard’ is the only reference to the character in the parts of the play Fleay, Dover Wilson, and Taylor believed to be by Shakespeare, and that the analogous spelling in 3 Henry VI (the authorship of which remains uncertain) may stem from the same hand.
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bibliographically, and these initial observations should be kept in mind as my analysis progresses. Fleay noticed that the Protector’s dukedom, ‘Gloucester’, as it appears in modern dictionaries, is spelled several different ways in the text. His literaryarchaeological hypothesis for the structure of the play confers great significance upon the distribution of the three forms ‘Gloster’, ‘Gloucester’ and ‘Glocester’, and Gaw painstakingly collated them, along with the different speech prefixes for the character and the forms found in stage directions. 16 He shows that when the pattern of variants is considered independently of Fleay’s structural hypothesis, its significance is undermined. The first two forms are both very common in sixteenth-century books and manuscripts and Gaw found the third to be quite frequent in Holinshed. 17 Heed should be taken of Dover Wilson’s caution, contained in his discussion of the copy for F, not to attach excessive weight to evidence based on different spellings of characters’ names. 18 Another proper name that appears in different spellings first identified by Fleay is the Duke of Burgundy. Taylor shows that while Compositor B used the form ‘Burgund-’ exclusively in his stints in 1 Henry VI, as well as in other Folio plays where the name occurs (King Lear, Richard III, and 3 Henry VI) Compositor A, in his work on 1 Henry VI, set ‘Burgonie’ thirteen times, all in Act 3, and ‘Burgundie’ only twice, in Act 2 (TLN 771) and Act 4 (TLN 2185). A quick check against his work on Henry V and 3 Henry VI reveals he had no qualms about setting the ‘Burgund-’ form,
16
Gaw 1926, pp. 69–71. Ibid. p. 71. Wilson 1952a, p. 106. Dover Wilson himself could not resist speculating that the five ‘Glocester’s found in F at TLN 1254; 3.1.49, TLN 1744; 4.1.0 SD (entry), TLN 2334; 5.1.0 SD (entry), TLN 2821; 5.5.0 SD (entry) and TLN 2925; 5.5.102 SD ‘may be Greene’s but I should not like to bet upon it’. 17 18
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with five instances of it appearing in those plays. Compositor A, unlike Compositor B, shows no personal preference for the spelling of this title, and, as the distribution of spellings in his stints coincides with a literary division, not a bibliographical one, the treatment of Burgundy might suggest a difference in his copy for Acts 2 and 4 and that for Act 3. But while the fact that ‘Burgonie’ appears only in Act 3 needs to be registered, little significance can be attributed to it in isolation. It is possible that Compositor B came across two instances of ‘Burgonie’ in his copy for F’s Actus Quartus, Scæna Tertia (5.2–4), at TLN 2399; 5.2.0 SD and TLN 2460; 5.3.29 SD and changed them to ‘Burgund-’. The most one can say at this stage is that the distribution of the Burgundy variants represents another minor bibliographical inconsistency in the Folio text which needs to be borne in mind as this textual examination proceeds. Taylor notes one further example of an apparently insignificant variation in a character’s name. The eponymous monarch of the play is called ‘Henry’ fifty-two times in F and ‘Harry’ only once—by Talbot at TLN 1955; 4.2.4. This ratio is at odds with Shakespeare’s strong preference for ‘Harry’ outside the Henry VI plays (114 versus 34). 19 As analysed in Chapter 2, the structural design of 1 Henry VI and the use of an unlikely historical source strongly suggest that the glaring inconsistency in Winchester’s rank between 1.3—where he is clearly a cardinal—and 3.1 and 4.1— where he is just as clearly a mere bishop—is due to the scenes having been differently authored. 20 Another inconsistency in the text—this time an orthographical one, first
19 Taylor 1995, p. 168. The only other instance of ‘Harry’ in the Henry VI plays is found in 3 Henry VI; the king addresses himself thus at III.i.15: ‘No, Harry, Harry, ’tis no land of thine;’. 20 See section 5 of Chapter 2.
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identified by Taylor—helps to reinforce the hypothesis that the cardinal of Act 1 was created independently of the one in Act 5.
4.3 ‘[A] humble but frequent interjection’: ‘O’ and ‘Oh’ 21 Taylor’s charting of the distributions of ‘O’ or ‘Oh’ in Renaissance play-texts has been ‘remarkably helpful in distinguishing the work of some authors’. 22 In his table reproduced on the following page, ‘the first column indicates which Folio compositor (A or B) set the relevant lines; the second column gives the Folio through line number (TLN); “j” opposite a line number indicates that the line fills the Folio column and that spellings in that column might theoretically have been influenced by the compositor’s need to justify his type’. 23 Before interpreting the distribution of the different spellings, Taylor verifies that they do not depend on compositorial preference: Compositor A set the sequence of ‘O’ from TLN 108–635 and the sequence of ‘Oh’ at TLN 1276–1644; Compositor B set a sequence of ‘O’ at TLN 1995–2119, and a sequence of ‘Oh’ at TLN 2282–2631; both compositors set a run of ‘O’ at TLN 1995–2177. That the compositors adhered to their copy with respect to the spelling of this word in this play is confirmed by Taylor’s charting of their similar behaviour across the other Folio plays they each worked on in other studies. 24 The possibility of scribal interference in this distribution, for which no evidence has been found elsewhere in the text, finds no reinforcement here. Taylor asks:
21
Taylor 1995, p. 153. Ibid. pp. 153–4; Gary Taylor and John Jowett, Shakespeare Reshaped 1606–1623 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 248–259. 23 Taylor 1995, p. 201, n. 31. 24 Ibid. n. 32. 22
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Table 3: Distribution of the spellings ‘O’ and ‘Oh’ in the Folio 1 Henry VI (Taylor)
Compositor
A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A B B B B B B B A A A A A B B B B B B B B B B B B
TLN
‘O’
108 120 (j) 157 501 541 542 635 1110 1178 1276 1288 1322 1358 1482 (j) 1644 1808 1899 1995 2034 2040 2114 2119 2126 2177 2203 2232 2248 (j) 2254 2282 2313 2315 2440 2469 2483 2497 2631 2673 2716 2752
O O O O O O O
‘Oh’
Act and Scene (Traditional Divisions)
Act 1
Oh O
Act 2, scene 5 Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh
O
Act 3
Act 4, scene 1 Oh
O O O O O O O
4.2–4.7.32 Oh
O O O Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh O Oh Oh
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4.7.33–end
why should a scribe have transcribed only act 3 and act 5? In fact, why should a scribe’s activities coincide with literary divisions in the work of art, rather than mechanical divisions (like the end of a manuscript sheet of paper) or fortuitous divisions (like the death or illness of the scribe that began copying the manuscript)? 25
With the possibility of both types of interference shown to be very slight, Taylor legitimately draws the following conclusion:
The pattern of spellings of this interjection, in itself, suggests heterogeneous copy, with at least two and possibly more hands at work, and the distribution of these hands strongly suggests different authors, rather than scribes. 26
The ‘O/Oh’ pattern forms a sturdy skeleton which Taylor begins to flesh out with the other variables already traced in the text. The hand that preferred ‘O’ in Act 1 also drew Winchester as a cardinal and referred to Joan of Arc exclusively with the ‘Puz-’ stem; the hand (or hands) that preferred ‘Oh’ in Acts 3 and 5 referred to Winchester as a bishop four times in 3.1, depicted the reaction to his ‘new’ appointment as a cardinal in 5.1, and also referred to Joan exclusively with the ‘Puc-’ stem. The hypothesis that the confusion over Winchester’s rank in F was the mistake of a single author is undermined by the agreement between 3.1, 4.1, and 4.7.33–5.5 in their treatment of Winchester and their spelling of the exclamation (‘Oh’), while Act 1 differs in both. Taylor argues convincingly that the correspondence here between two distinct types of evidence—the dramaturgical and the orthographical—‘makes it difficult to deny that we are dealing with different “hands” in both senses of the term:
25 26
Ibid. p. 154. Ibid.
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different penmen and different writers’. After assessing the distribution of all three markers, Taylor concludes that:
The treatment of Joan divides act 1 (“Puzel”) from acts 3 to 5 (“Pucell”); the treatment of Winchester divides acts [sic] 1 (cardinal) from acts 3 to 5 (bishop); the treatment of the interjection divides act 1 (consistently “O”) from act 3 (consistently “Oh”) and the end of the play, from the death of Talbot on (ten “Oh”/one “O”). On this basis we must strongly suspect that the author of act 1 did not write acts 3 and 5, which consistently differ in all three variables. 27
Already, at this early stage of my investigation, Taylor’s evidence for the multiple authorship of 1 Henry VI is seen to be compelling. No critic convinced of Shakespeare’s sole authorship of the play has been able to account for the distribution of these three variables in F.
4.4 The Folio Scene Divisions Revisited Taylor resumes his case by examining the act and scene divisions in F, noting that Shakespeare was disinclined to number scene divisions in his autograph manuscripts. Not one of the ‘good’ quartos (or the ‘bad’ ones, for that matter) printed before 1623 contains scene divisions; nor do any of the Folio plays apparently set from authorial manuscript. ‘We can therefore assume,’ Taylor writes in ‘Shakespeare and Others’, ‘that the parts of 1 Henry VI that mark and number scene divisions were written by
27
Ibid. pp. 155–6. The treatment of Winchester also divides Act 1 from 4.1, in which Winchester is a bishop as well.
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Comment [RJM17]: or ‘has been able to account’
one of Shakespeare’s collaborators, rather than by Shakespeare himself’. 28 This is not a legitimate assumption however, as Taylor himself admits later in the same article: ‘one must concede that the marking of scene divisions cannot be relied upon as a sure clue to authorship’. 29 This self-contradiction undermines Taylor’s ultimate division of shares in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ because one of its foundations is this same ‘authorial’ variable. In Textual Companion Taylor speculates that ‘all of the [act] divisions might be the work of X and Y alone, or of whoever put the various authorial papers together’. 30 Again Taylor appears less willing to entertain uncertainty in his hypothesis for the genesis of 1 Henry VI in 1995 than he was in 1987. We cannot discount the possibility that the act and scene divisions in F were introduced or revised by an authorial or theatrical agent at some stage, or indeed stages, between the play’s original composition (late 1591–early 1592) and its 1623 printing. Thus, we ought to be extremely cautious about denying Shakespeare two-fifths of the play on the strength of the uniquely inconsistent act and scene divisions in F. While the weight of evidence marshalled so far suggests that it is far more likely than not that F preserves the work of more than one author, we have as yet only an embryonic idea of where the authorial divisions should be placed. Taylor asserts that by this stage of his argument, the following initial separation can be made:
Z (act 1): cardinal/“O”/“Puzel”/no scene divisions Y (acts 3 and 5): bishop/“Oh”/“Pucell”/scene divisions 31
28
Ibid. pp. 162–3. Ibid. p. 178. TC, p. 218. 31 Taylor 1995, p. 156. 29 30
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It is important to remember that Taylor’s act divisions are the traditional ones and not the original Folio ones. Act 1 indeed separates itself markedly from the rest of the play, but things are not as tidy as Taylor suggests. There is a complication he appears to have overlooked. When he goes on to state that ‘Act 4 does not identify Winchester’s rank’, he is incorrect; Winchester is referred to as ‘Lord Bishop’ by Gloucester at TLN 1746; 4.1.1. 32 That scene contains one ‘O’ and one ‘Oh’. Treating, as Taylor does at this point, 4.1–4.7.32 as ‘a single dramatic unit’ in these circumstances seems premature. The Bordeaux sequence begins at 4.2 and, though Talbot dies at 4.7.32, F does not mark Scena secunda (the traditional 5.1) for another sixty-four lines. While there is clear evidence that the Elizabethan collaborative process sometimes assigned playwrights whole acts, at this stage of his article Taylor has not presented sufficient evidence to assume legitimately that this is what happened with the exceptionally divided 1 Henry VI. Chapter 2 demonstrated that there are very strong reasons for thinking Taylor’s ‘single dramatic unit’ is the product of substantial revision, containing the work of two playwrights. Inaccuracy and assumption are seen to be creeping into Taylor’s argument. His evidence is certainly compelling, but his interpretation of that evidence needs to be closely monitored. Before we turn to the linguistic and stylistic peculiarities of F, one other variable requires discussion. Compositors A and B have been shown to have had different attitudes towards the setting of round brackets, or parentheses, in their work on the Histories and Tragedies in the First Folio. 33 Compositor B set many more pairs than
32 33
Ibid. p. 156. Ibid. p. 161.
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Compositor A overall, which suggests it was more his intervention than differences in his copy that accounted for the discrepancy between the two. Of the forty-two pairs in 1 Henry VI, Compositor B set thirty. I reproduce Taylor’s table showing the distribution of round brackets in F below. A dash (‘—’) indicates that the compositor set no part of the relevant act or scene.
Table 4: Distribution of round brackets in the Folio 1 Henry VI (Taylor)
Traditional Division
Compositor A
Compositor B
Act 1
0
—
Act 2
8
2
Act 3
4
—
4.1
—
17
4.2–4.7.32
0
1
4.7.33–end
—
10
After setting no pairs in Act 1, Compositor A set eight pairs in his work on Act 2 (all but 44 lines) and four in Act 3. As Taylor remarks:
The complete absence of brackets in act 1 therefore probably reflects a real difference in the copy for that act. Likewise, although some of the seventeen pairs of brackets in IV.i were almost certainly added by Compositor B, it seems unlikely that he was responsible for all of them. The absence of brackets from act 1 distinguishes it from II.i [in which there are three pairs] and IV.i at least. 34
34
Ibid.
179
Again it is Act 1 that is most clearly distinguished, this time by a habit of punctuation. Punctuation was of course far more haphazard in Renaissance play-texts than it is today and compositorial interference is almost certain in F. Nevertheless, when considered in conjunction with the variables already detected, the distribution of round brackets in F supports the hypothesis that whoever wrote Act 1 did not write all of 1 Henry VI.
4.5 From ‘Here’ to…: The Linguistic Peculiarity of 1 Henry VI Chambers considered F’s stage directions to be elaborate and noted that those in Act 1 often have the unusual opening ‘Here’. 35 Taylor explains that outside 1 Henry VI, this adverb occurs in stage directions only twenty-four times in authoritative texts, a number of which may not have originated with Shakespeare. 36 It is therefore remarkable to find no less than ten examples in 1 Henry VI, and even more remarkable that nine of them appear in Act 1. I reproduce Taylor’s listing below, adding the instance at TLN 569, which he counts, but which was omitted in the printing of his article:
Here Alarum, they are beaten by the English, with great losse. Here they fight, and Ioane de Puzel ouercomes.
(TLN 216–7) (TLN 306)
Here Glosters men beat out the Cardinalls men, and enter in the hurly-burly the Maior of London, and his Officers.
(TLN 425–7)
Here they skirmish againe.
35 36
(TLN 441)
Chambers 1930, i, 289. Taylor 1995, p. 157.
180
Here they shot, and Salisbury falls downe.
(TLN 539–40)
Here an Alarum, and it Thunders and Lightens
(TLN 569)
Here an Alarum againe, and Talbot pursueth the Dolphin, and driueth him: Then enter Ioane de Puzel, driuing Englishmen before her. Then enter Talbot. (TLN 587–90) Here they fight.
(TLN 600)
Alarum. Here another Skirmish.
(TLN 629)
Here sound an English March
(TLN 1617) [3.3.30]
Although Compositor A set all these stage directions, he shows no tendency to introduce the word elsewhere in his extensive work on the Histories. Taylor writes:
Probably all ten therefore derive from the printer’s copy. Even if that manuscript was a transcript, one cannot easily explain why the scribe, or a prompter, should have used “Here” so insistently in the stage directions of act 1 but only once thereafter. Scribal interference thus seems most unlikely to account for these directions, which almost certainly reflect authorial practice. 37
As purely mechanical instructions for the actors, one author’s stage directions are hardly likely to influence another’s, especially so locally. The contexts in which these examples appear have parallels in the action of Acts 2 and 5 and elsewhere in Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies. Taylor concludes that ‘[t]he only reasonable explanation for the distribution of “here” directions is that the author of act 1 did not
37
Ibid. p. 158.
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write much of the rest of this play or much of the rest of the Shakespeare canon’. 38 Certainly a more convincing explanation, one which takes into account all of the evidence marshalled by this stage in Taylor’s article, has yet to be published. Act 1 goes on to distinguish itself further by its preponderance of obsolete verb inflections. Taylor established that no Shakespearean play has as many verbs ending in -eth as 1 Henry VI; of the thirty-one examples, fourteen, or almost half, occur in Act 1. 39 The rest of the acts, in order, have four, five, two and six instances respectively. The syllabic -ed inflection (for example, the trisyllabic ‘despisèd’ instead of the disyllabic ‘despised’) was becoming less and less common in verse in the early 1590s, and again 1 Henry VI registers more instances than any other play in the Shakespeare canon. Act 1 shows a particular penchant for this older form, exhibiting thirty-one examples, while the other acts present thirteen, eighteen, twelve, and fourteen examples respectively. 40 With regard to both obsolete inflections, Act 1 distinguishes itself most strongly from Acts 2 and 4. Taylor goes on to show how Act 1 differs not only from the rest of the play in the frequency of these variables but also from the rest of the early Shakespeare canon, and concludes emphatically that:
These two linguistic texts [sic] thus corroborate both aspects of the evidence presented by the frequency of “here” in stage directions: that the author of act 1 (Z) did not write the rest of the play and was not Shakespeare. 41
38
Ibid. pp. 158–9. Ibid. Ibid. 41 Ibid. p. 160. 39 40
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The tracing of apparently incidental linguistic habits, such as the extent to which a playwright prefers the ‘you’ form of the second person pronoun over the ‘ye’ form, or whether he favours ‘among’ over ‘amongst’ or ‘between’ over ‘betwixt’, can yield telling evidence in attribution studies. Shakespeare overwhelmingly preferred ‘you’ to ‘ye’ throughout his career, and it is therefore not surprising that the plays with by far the highest incidence of ‘ye’, Henry VIII or All is True and The Two Noble Kinsmen, which date from 1613, have been shown to be collaborations with a playwright who used ‘ye’ liberally: John Fletcher. In view of the already established oddities of 1 Henry VI, it is again not surprising that the play has the next highest total of ‘ye’s in the canon, with twenty-three examples. 42 Only three of these, however, are to be found in Acts 1, 2 and 4 (once in 2.2 and twice in 4.1); the remaining twenty are in Acts 3 and 5. As both compositors set sections of the ‘you’ and ‘ye’ parts of the play, their interference can be discounted; ‘nor is it creditably attributed to intermittent scribal sophistication’. 43 Taylor’s table, which is reproduced below, makes the distribution across the play clear:
Table 5: Distribution of ‘Ye’ and ‘You’ in the Folio 1 Henry VI (Taylor) Acts (Traditional Division)
Ye
You
1
0
32
2
1
32
3
9
35
4
2
37
5
11
44
42 The distribution of ‘ye’ across the Shakespeare canon can be easily compared by conducting a Literature Online search. 43 Ibid. p. 161.
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Shakespeare’s overwhelming preference of ‘you’ over ‘ye’ throughout his career makes his responsibility for all of the ‘ye’s in Acts 3 and 5 very unlikely. The case for Shakespeare not having written Act 1 can be further consolidated by the distribution of two other linguistic variables identified by MacDonald P. Jackson. Shakespeare used the contraction ‘ne’er’ sparingly throughout his career, and Jackson has shown how the total for Act 1 (eleven) is itself higher than that for all but three of his plays, two of which, Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Timon of Athens have been shown to be collaborations by definitive recent studies. 44 The third, 3 Henry VI, was widely thought to be a collaboration by other playwrights later revised by Shakespeare until the rise of the modern orthodoxy established by Alexander. 45 There are only six occurrences of ‘ne’er’ outside Act 1 in 1 Henry VI. 46 Jackson has also demonstrated that ‘and’ is used significantly less often, proportionately to other words, in Act 1 than in the rest of the play. 47 Shakespeare consistently preferred ‘between’ to ‘betwixt’ and ‘among’ to ‘amongst’. 48 Again, 1 Henry VI is anomalous: it has the highest total for ‘amongst’ in the canon and its examples of ‘betwixt’ are matched only by 1 Henry IV, which was set from a scribal manuscript. 49
44 For Pericles see Jackson 2003 and for Timon of Athens see Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author (Oxford: OUP, 2002), pp. 244–90. 45 See Vincent 1998, pp. 50–67. 46 TLN 728; 2.1.44, TLN 820; 2.2.48, TLN 1859; 4.1.110, TLN 2132; 4.5.19, TLN 2535; 5.3.98, TLN 2843; 5.5.22. 47 Privately. Using Thomas Merriam’s data—a list for every scene in every Shakespeare play of the number of instances of ‘and’, the total number of words, the relative frequency of ‘and’, and the number of standard deviations that the scene’s ‘and’ rate exceeds or falls short of the average ‘and’ rate for all scenes—Jackson shows that the probability of the very low ‘and’ rates (relative to other words) found in scenes 1.1–6 of 1 Henry VI being a matter of chance is less than one in a thousand. 48 Taylor mistakenly states that Shakespeare preferred ‘amongst’ to ‘among’ in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ (p. 162). 49 Ibid. See Jackson, ‘Two Shakespeare Quartos: Richard III (1597) and 1 Henry IV (1598)’, SB, 36 (1983), 173– 90, and TC, pp. 329–30.
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among: 2.5, 5.1, 5.5 amongst: 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 4.7, 5.2 betwixt: 1.1, 3.1(2), 4.1(3), 5.4 between: 2.4(7), 5.1, 5.3
The counts for these variants are much lower than those for the ‘O/Oh’ and ‘you/ye’ distributions and consequently have less impact on the authorial pattern emerging. Nevertheless, their distributions add weight to the hypothesis that Shakespeare did not write the whole the play. That he did write 2.4, the Rose Plucking scene, and the one most readily attributable to him on stylistic and dramaturgical grounds, finds endorsement here. The high concentration of ‘betwixt’ in 3.1 and 4.1 calls Shakespeare’s authorship of those scenes into question. Another marshalling of all the variables identified thus far is now called for. Taylor at this stage divides the play between three authors, and I reproduce his attributions below:
Z (act 1): cardinal, “O,” no [scene] divisions , “Puzel”, Roan, -èd, -eth, ne’er, no brackets, here
Y (acts 3 and 5): bishop, “Oh,” scene divisions, “Pucelle,” Roän, “Burgonie,” ye
X (act 2, 4.2–4.7.32): “O,” “Puzell,” Joane, no divisions, “Burgundie” 50
50
Taylor 1995, p. 162.
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I will address each of the variables in the order Taylor lists them. The ‘O/Oh’ distribution certainly distinguishes Acts 3 and 5 from Act 1 and 4.2–4.7.32. But the entirety of Act 2 has only one ‘O’ and one ‘Oh’, both in the same scene, 2.5, meaning that act cannot be distinguished from Acts 3 and 5 by the distribution of this variable. There is no trace of 4.1 and the final sixty-four lines of 4.7 in the above division; both omissions go unexplained by Taylor. The first scene of Act 4 exhibits just one ‘O’ and one ‘Oh’, and as I pointed out above, does in fact identify Winchester as a bishop. It is important to emphasise that Joan of Arc appears only in the first scene of Act 2 and only in the last scene of Act 4. ‘Puzell’ occurs only once in the play at 2.1.20, where, as Dover Wilson noted, the deliberate pun may have influenced the spelling. In 4.7 the ‘Puc-’ speech prefix appears twice (TLN 2270; 4.7.37, TLN 2306; 4.7.72) and the ‘Pucel.’ speech prefix once (TLN 2321; 4.7.87). Recall that Taylor does not register that ‘Ione’ appears nine times in the play, all in Act 5. As Compositor B alone set that act and no other scenes in which ‘Ioane’ appears, the spelling could have originated with him. The variant could be authorial however: Taylor’s evidence is insufficient as yet to discount the possibility that Acts 3 and 5 contain the work of more than one author. The form ‘Burgund-’ appears twice in Act 5, which may have appeared as ‘Burgonie’ in Compositor B’s copy. But the distribution of this variable in no way positively links the acts ascribed to Y or distinguishes both of them from the rest of the play. The appearance of ‘Roan’ and ‘Roän’ in Taylor’s list of distinguishing variables comes from out of the blue. No mention of the French city has been made in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ until this point, and Taylor gives no explanation for its appearance in his division of shares. Fleay first noticed that Rouen (consistently spelled ‘Roan’ in the play) scans disyllabically in Act 1 (pronounced ‘Roän’), and 186
monosyllabically in Act 3. There are nine occurrences of the place name in the latter act, but as it only appears once in Act 1, little significance can be attached to the distribution of the different scansions in the text. Not only does Taylor fail to offer any explanation for the inclusion of this variable in his division, he errs by confusing the location of the two scansions as well. 51 Clearly, Taylor’s division is problematic and less tidy than first impressions may suggest. That the author of Act 1 did not write the rest of the play is extremely likely. But Taylor’s division of the remaining four traditional acts between X and Y relies to a great extent on the distribution of just one variable in the text: the variant spellings ‘O’ and ‘Oh’. Act 2, with just one ‘O’ and one ‘Oh’ in 2.5, and a handful of rare variants concerning the nomenclature of Joan of Arc found in 2.1, is only distinguished as an act unit by the Folio division. Acts 2 and 4 can only be said to be connected by a lack of scene divisions in the traditional act and scene division. Acts 3 and 5 are linked only by their overwhelming preference for ‘Oh’, the traditional act and scene divisions, and the fact that they contain all but three of the twenty-three ‘ye’s in the play. Because Act 1 separates itself so consistently from the others, variable after variable, perhaps Taylor was encouraged to look at 1 Henry VI primarily as a play of acts rather than one of scenes or even parts of scenes. Chapter 2 established that only by a scene-by-scene analysis can one begin to get to grips with the structure of the play; the same applies to the analysis of its authorship. My critique of Taylor’s
51 Ibid. Taylor perpetuates this confusion in his Table 2 (p. 196), which summarises the distribution of the authorial variables he identifies in F.
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authorial division demonstrates how easily generalisation can creep into an hypothesis if the focus is not tight enough.
4.6 Stylistic Fingerprints When we begin to look for Shakespeare’s mark in the play, it quickly emerges that of the three unknown authors above, X approximates his authorial habits most closely. Like X, Shakespeare never marked scenes, used ‘ye’ sparingly, and preferred ‘between’ to ‘betwixt’. 52 The two scenes in the play regarded by critics as the most Shakespearean on purely stylistic grounds, 2.4 and 4.2, also fall within X’s share of the play. 53 Modern attribution techniques have succeeded in lifting some of the thick fog of subjectivity that has hitherto obscured discussions of Shakespeare’s style and how it differs from those of his contemporaries. This section dusts 1 Henry VI for stylistic fingerprints, line by line, and by doing so considerably objectifies our understanding of the play’s style by a close analysis of its linguistic and literary idiosyncrasies.
4.6.1 Compound Adjectives I have shown elsewhere how the high number and quality of compound adjectives in Act 3 of 2 Henry VI helps to separate that section of the play out as the most Shakespearean. 54 In Shakespeare, The First Steps, Mincoff considers that act ‘a remarkable achievement in dramatic verse, a peak indeed not surpassed for some time
52
Taylor 1995, pp. 162–3. Ibid. p. 163; Mincoff 1976, pp. 82–3. 54 Paul. J. Vincent, ‘Inconsistencies in 2 Henry VI’, NQ, 246 (2001), 270–4. 53
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to come’. 55 Below are the compound adjectives found in 1 Henry VI keyed to Taylor’s division of the play between X, Y, and Z above. I have used Taylor’s wordcounts and include the three compound adjectives that occur within the lines he omits from his division in square brackets.
Z (Act 1): subtle-witted (1.1.25), mad-brained (1.2.15), raw-boned (1.2.35), hair-brained (1.2.37), keen-edged (1.2.98), Faint-hearted (1.3.22), high-minded (1.5.12), hungrystarved (1.5.16), oft-subduèd (1.5.32), rich-jewelled (1.6.25)
10 compounds in 4809 words, or 1 every 481 words.
Y (Acts 3 and 5): late-betrayèd (3.2.82), late-deceased (3.2.132), over-tedious (3.3.43), tender-dying (3.3.48), lofty-plumèd (5.3.25), easy-held (5.3.139)
6 compounds in 7988 words, or 1 every 1331 words.
X (Act 2, 4.2–4.7.32): over-veiled (2.2.6), new-come (2.2.20), strong-knit (2.3.20), tongue-tied (2.4.25), true-born (2.4.27), blood-drinking (2.4.108), Nestor-like (2.5.6), Swift-winged (2.5.15), late-despisèd (2.5.36), first-begotten (2.5.65), Strong-fixèd (2.5.102), air-braving (4.2.13), rascal-like (4.2.49), moody-mad (4.2.50), scarce-cold (4.3.50), ever-living (4.3.51), over-daring (4.4.5), war-wearied (4.4.18), noble-minded (4.4.37), ill-boding (4.5.6), bold-faced (4.6.12), dizzy-eyed (4.7.11), over-mounting (4.7.15)
23 compounds in 5909 words or 1 every 257 words.
[4.1; 4.7.33–96: hedge-born (4.1.43), raging-wood (4.7.35), fly-blown (4.7.76)]
55
Mincoff 1976, p. 88.
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The listing shows that Z used compound adjectives almost three times more often than Y, while X used them roughly twice as often as Z. Alfred Hart, one of the most assiduous Shakespeare scholars of the twentieth century, demonstrates in Shakespeare and the Homilies that the Bard compounded adjectives more frequently and inventively than most writers. 56 Certainly 2.4 and 4.2 are among the scenes with the highest rate of compound adjectives, but the rate is consistently high across the whole of both acts, excluding the 194 lines of 4.1 in which only ‘hedge-born’ appears. The 210 lines after 4.1 (scenes 4.2–5) contain no less than nine compound adjectives and the remaining 153 lines (4.6–7) contain five, a result which supports Taylor’s conviction that 4.1 was not authored by the man who wrote 4.2–4.7.32. From his own counts, Taylor concludes that ‘on the basis of compound adjectives alone it would be reasonable to suspect that Shakespeare did not write the entire play and to conclude that II.iv and IV.ii–IV.vii.32 are the passages most probably his’. I concur with Taylor’s first reasonable suspicion, but my own counts, based on the New Cambridge edition of Hattaway, who believes the play to be entirely Shakespearean, reveal that 2.5 has two more compound adjectives (five) than 2.4 (three). In terms of the number of lines per compound adjective, the scenes 2.1–3 and 2.5 (one every forty-four lines) most closely approximate 4.2–4.7.32 (one every twenty-seven lines). The ten compounds in Act 1 (one every sixty lines) are, as Taylor says, indeed more inventive than most of those in Acts 3 and 5, but so are many of those in 2.1–3 and 2.5. The Rose Plucking scene (2.4) is in no way distinguished from 2.2 and 2.5 by the frequency and inventiveness of its compound adjectives.
56
Alfred Hart, Shakespeare and the Homilies (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1934), pp. 232–7, 254.
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4.6.2 Classical Allusions The distribution and nature of classical allusions in a play of uncertain authorship can also act as a stylistic discriminator. Hart showed how Marlowe and Greene used them much more frequently than did Shakespeare. The 2,136 lines of 1 Tamburlaine contain more classical allusions than the 8,653 lines of the three plays on the reign of Henry VI. Edward II alone exhibits as many examples as 1 and 2 Henry VI combined. The ‘bad’ quarto of Greene’s Orlando Furioso prunes many of the classical allusions given to the eponymous part in Greene’s manuscript, but so elemental were they to the character’s conception that the players were forced to retain fifty-one of the original’s one-hundred-and-eight allusions in the title role, just to enable a coherent performance. 57 By Douglas Bush’s count, the three Henry VI plays contain fifty classical allusions, an average of seventeen per play, while Shakespeare’s six later history plays before 1600 contain just sixty-six, or eleven per play on average. In the latter group, many of the allusions are used satirically or comically; these usages are alien to the earlier plays. 58 A full investigation of the evolution of Shakespeare’s use of classical allusions and how it compares with the habits of his contemporaries would demand a book-length study. Here it is important to remember that the man from Stratford never went to university, and all of his well known early contemporaries did. Greene, Marlowe, Nashe and Peele were all ‘university wits’, Masters of Arts, whose works contain ostentatious displays of their learning, especially their classical
57 Alfred Hart, Stolne and Surreptitious Copies: A Comparative Study of Shakespeare’s Bad Quartos (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1942), p. 154. 58 Douglas Bush, ‘Classical Myth in Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 65–85, at pp. 66–7.
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learning. Shakespeare’s official classical education went no further than Stratford grammar school. When Ben Jonson’s fond recollection of his close friend’s ‘little Latin and less Greek’ in his Folio tribute is considered in relation to the comparatively low incidence of classical allusions in his plays, we can infer with confidence that Shakespeare did not believe the showy display of classical learning to be a prerequisite for good playwrighting. But as the young pretender he was in the early 1590s, Shakespeare would have been only too aware that a command of classical allusion was considered a prerequisite before a new playwright could be admitted into the establishment. The fact that Shakespeare employed considerably more classical allusions in the early 1590s than he did at the end of that decade might be explained by his awareness that such displays of learning would boost his chances of gaining commissions in the close-knit Elizabethan theatre community. There is another possible explanation, however: the possibility that Shakespeare was not solely responsible for all the classical allusions in the three Henry VI plays. J. A. K. Thomson has shown how unlikely it is that the classical allusions in 2 Henry VI all have the same authorial origin, and those found in 1 Henry VI exhibit their own peculiarities. 59 Of the fifteen classical allusions Thomson records in the play, two thirds are concentrated in Act 1, which accounts for just over one fifth of the play’s total length. 60 Act 2 contributes just one—Act 3 none at all. The same allusion, to Daedalus and his son Icarus, is made twice in consecutive scenes in Act 4, which Thomson counts only once, and the remaining three all come after 5.2. But close
59
J. A. K. Thomson, Shakespeare and the Classics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952), pp. 89–91. Hereafter cited as ‘Thomson 1952’. Ibid. pp. 83–8. Hattaway’s New Cambridge edition of 1 Henry VI runs to 2, 671 lines. Act 1 is 596 lines long, or 22.3 percent of the play.
60
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scrutiny of 1 Henry VI reveals that Thomson’s figures are incomplete—a situation he was aware of, it seems, and explained with the following:
many allusions appear, no doubt in slightly different form, in more than one play. When such an allusion has once been explained, it would be intolerable to repeat the explanation. But the effect of omitting an increasing number of explanations is to make the later plays seem much emptier of classical matter, compared with the earlier, than in fact they are. I can only hope that the reader will bear this in mind. 61
This modus operandi makes a quantitative comparison across the Shakespeare canon impossible and impairs any qualitative analysis—‘the slightly different form[s]’ being crucial in this respect. One wonders what prevented Thomson from simply referring his readers to his first explanation whenever the same allusion arose again. As things stand, no one study completely catalogues the classical allusions in the Shakespeare corpus. Such a Herculean task would go beyond the scope of this thesis but, were it performed, considerable light would be shed on Shakespeare’s use of classical allusion throughout his career. I present below an in-depth analysis of the classical allusions in 1 Henry VI which Thomson omitted and in doing so reveal still more evidence showing the play to be unlike any other collected in the First Folio. The second scene of Act 1 opens with:
Mars his true moving, even as in the heavens So in the earth, to this day is not known.
61
Ibid. pp. 47–8.
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Dover Wilson, in his 1952 Cambridge edition of the play, finds evidence in these lines supporting his contention that Thomas Nashe in fact wrote this scene:
The observation is lifted almost verbatim from Nashe’s favourite store of second-handing learning, Sandford’s translation of Cornelius Agrippa’s De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum, where we read “Neither hathe the true movinge of Mars bene knowen untill this daie”, a piece of “philosophy” which reappears, as Steevens noted, in Nashe’s Have with you to Saffron Walden. 62
The following chapter evaluates the case for Nashe having contributed to 1 Henry VI; here my focus is on the peculiarity of this allusion to the Roman god of war. The Shakespeare canon contains no other references to the planet/god Mars’ ‘moving’— its as then uncharted orbit, or the fluctuating fortunes of war. Indeed there is not one similar usage in all the poetry, plays and prose in the Renaissance Period (1500–1660) of the Literature Online database—Nashe’s Saffron Walden not being in the database at the time of writing. 63 Charles, the Dauphin, calls Joan an ‘Amazon’ at 1.2.104. The Amazons were a mythical race of female warriors, said to have come from Scythia, whom Homer allies with the Trojans in the Iliad. Later in the same scene, it is again the Dauphin who likens Joan to ‘Helen, the mother of great Constantine’(142). Constantine, who was the first Christian Roman Emperor, reigned from 306 to 337, and may have been converted by his mother who was led by a vision to find, on Calvary, the cross on which Christ was crucified. We have here an allusion that bridges Classical and
62
Wilson 1952a, p. xxiii. A Literature Online search reveals Shakespeare referred to the martial god forty-nine times in eighteen of his plays and poems. 63
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Christian Rome, the only example of this resonant intersection of the two empires in Shakespeare; nowhere else does he refer to either Constantine or his mother. Act 2 contains three further allusions unmarked by Thomson. There are two in two lines of 2.3, as the amazed Countess of Auvergne calls Talbot, the Scourge of France, a ‘silly dwarf’:
I thought I should have seen some Hercules, A second Hector, for his grim aspect… (18–9)
The names of the demigod Hercules, performer of the twelve superhuman tasks, and Hector, Troy’s greatest warrior, sound comparatively natural in the mouth of the Countess, who earlier in the scene had compared herself to the obscure ‘Scythian Tomyris’(6). Later, in 2.5, the dying Mortimer describes his grey locks as being ‘Nestor-like agèd’(6). This evocation of the oldest Greek leader at Troy, and a type of old age, is the most condensed use of classical allusion that the play has exhibited up until this point, but the nature of the comparison is peculiar. Taylor reverses the order of ll. 6 and 7 in his Oxford Complete Works edition, and observes in Textual Companion that ‘Mortimer is more plausibly compared to Nestor than are his “Locks” or “death”’. 64 Act 3 contains one classical allusion uncited by Thomson—when Talbot dismisses one of Joan’s ripostes with ‘I speak not to that railing Hecate’(3.2.64). That a whole act—some 473 lines—should exhibit just one solitary allusion after the
64
TC, p. 222.
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thirteen heaped upon the audience by Act 1 (596 lines) is very suspicious. Still more suspicious is the trisyllabic scansion of ‘Hecate’, which Shakespeare never adopted on the four other occasions he invoked the witch goddess. 65 In addition to the two references to Icarus, I find a further six classical allusions in Act 4, which show interesting variation. The first scene, running to 194 lines, does not register, but 4.2 contains this comparatively embedded example:
You tempt the fury of my three attendants, Lean Famine, quartering Steel, and climbing Fire. (10–11)
Holinshed has Henry V speak the following at the siege of Rouen: ‘The goddess of battle called Bellona had three handmaidens ever of necessity attending upon her, as blood, fire, and famine’. 66 Bellona was the Greek and Roman goddess of war, sister of Mars. This imaginative transformation of her handmaidens into the attendants of Talbot confers upon the English hero a god-like status, and is all the more dramatically effective for its coming just before his sacrificial death resulting from English infighting. This new-found subtlety reappears in 4.3:
Thus while the vulture of sedition Feeds in the bosom of such great commanders, (47–8)
65
Fully discussed in section 7 below. Holinshed, iii, 104 and Halle, p. 85. The opening Chorus in Shakespeare’s Henry V describes a Mars-like Henry at whose heals ‘famine, sword, and fire’ are ‘Leash’d in like hounds’(5). 66
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Instead of dropping the name of Prometheus or Tityus, giants condemned to have their livers eaten out eternally by vultures in Greek mythology, the author constructs an image that is intelligible to groundling and noble alike. It comes in Sir William Lucy’s dense seven-line speech that ends the scene in a chorus-like fashion, invoking the ‘scarce-cold conqueror’, Henry V. One senses the author felt the Greek names would distract his audience from the main purpose of the speech, which is to foreshadow that the factious English nobility, not the might of France, will be responsible for the loss of the dead king’s French conquests. The Icarus allusions in 4.6–7 are initially most remarkable for their proximity; just seventeen lines separate them. Both are spoken by old Talbot:
Then follow thou thy desp’rate sire of Crete, Thou Icarus; thy life to me is sweet. (4.6.54–5)
And in that sea of blood my boy did drench His over-mounting spirit; and there died My Icarus, my blossom, in his pride. (4.7.14–6)
Thomson maintains that the story of the artificer Daedalus and his ‘over-mounting’ son is ‘one of the Shakespearian myths’, but aside from a single reappearance in 3 Henry VI—another play where collaboration is suspected—they are not directly
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alluded to again by Shakespeare. 67 Such cloaking generalisation makes it still more difficult to gain an accurate idea of Shakespeare’s use of classical allusion from Thomson’s book. Excluding 3 Henry VI, is it not odd that, across the whole Shakespearean canon, Icarus, apparently a key figure in one of Shakespeare’s myths, appears only in 1 Henry VI and twice in twenty lines? The repetition is certainly awkward, and has been explained in different ways by different critics. 68 The first allusion is clumsy; indeed, as we saw in Chapter 2, 4.6 is a clumsy affair all round, with none of the polish of the earlier scenes of the Bordeaux sequence. Young Talbot shows no Icarian over-exuberance, no rashness of youth; rather a maturity and concern for reputation well beyond his tender years. The father, by styling himself Daedalus (who was exiled to Crete, not ‘of’ it—he was Athenian), should be aware that, unlike his son, the great artificer escaped Crete and lived to fight another day—but just three lines later he closes the scene with ‘let’s die in pride’ and has in fact been resigned to his inevitable defeat since line 30. There is murky thinking behind this classical allusion which, as a consequence, is not at all convincing. The second Icarus allusion, early in the next scene, is, by comparison, expertly executed. It is also much more subtle than its predecessor. It comes in the middle of the most affecting passage of the play, as old Talbot, mortally wounded, meditates on proud, ‘Triumphant Death’ and the nature of his son’s ‘pride’—little more than a convenient rhyme in the previous scene. There is no talk of the glory of war, and chivalry appears to have been drenched in the same sea of blood as young Talbot. The
67
Thomson 1952, p. 87. See Taylor 1995, p. 205, n. 75; TC, pp. 111–2, and Vincent 1998, pp. 50–67. Chambers thought the ‘duplication of a tasteless comparison of Talbot and his son to Daedalus and Icarus’ argued against Shakespeare’s authorship of most of the Talbot death sequence (Chambers 1930, i, 290–1). 68
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author reinterprets the ancient Greek story for his late sixteenth century English audience, presenting them with a very English Icarus, as the fate of John Talbot is narrated by his father with a psychological poignancy wholly absent from the myth. The artificiality of the patently forced rhymes in 4.6 turns the real pathos the playwright was striving for into what Drayton would have called base balladry. But the first thirty-two lines of 4.7, the only ones in the scene Taylor attributes to Shakespeare, are of a different order, despite being similarly under the yoke of rhyme. Talbot’s first speech, reproduced in full below to better illustrate the differences between the two Icarus allusions, shows a sudden advance in complexity of thought and command of language: there are four sentences in the first four lines while the remaining twelve lines are a single-sentence juggernaut that moves forward with cumulative momentum:
Where is my other life? Mine own is gone. O, where’s young Talbot, where is valiant John? Triumphant Death, smeared with captivity, Young Talbot’s valour makes me smile at thee. When he perceived me shrink and on my knee, His bloody sword he brandished over me, And, like a hungry lion, did commence Rough deeds of stern impatience; But when my angry guardant stood alone, Tend’ring my ruin and assailed of none, Dizzy-eyed fury and great rage of heart Suddenly made him from my side to start Into the clust’ring battle of the French; And in that sea of blood my boy did drench
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His over-mounting spirit; and there died My Icarus, my blossom, in his pride. (4.7.1–16)
Here is the Talbots’ real substance, not merely their shadows. This Talbot is a world apart from the Talbot of the Countess scene (2.3). There is none of the hollow rhetoric which padded out 4.6 at the expense of dramatic realism here. The son’s ‘pride’ is threefold: outraged by his father’s ‘ruin’ at the hands of the French, he is overcome by rash ‘Dizzy-eyed fury’—a modern adaptation of the rash pride of Icarus—and as a result he dies in his greatest pride (glory) in the pride (prime) of life. The sea into which Icarus plunges to his death is here a ‘sea of blood’. Compared to the confused paying of classical lip service in the previous scene, this is a sophisticated updating of the Greek myth. The structure and content of this speech is extraordinary in the context of the whole play. To achieve such dramatic intensity while extending one sentence over six rhymed couplets is no mean feat. It is as if Talbot, his breaths obviously numbered, dare not pause in his account for fear of being prevented from finishing it by ‘Triumphant Death’, waiting in the wings. 69 The speech is imbued with rich and strange language. Imaginative coinages like ‘Tend’ring my ruin’ and ‘clust’ring battle’ have no counterparts in Literature Online’s Renaissance period. Line 3 presents another embedded classical allusion unremarked by Thomson: ‘Triumphant Death, smeared with captivity’. The unique density of this gruesome personification is
69 Compare the ‘antiquated opening monologue and “talky” exposition of the Mortimer scene [2.5] (especially unnatural in the mouth of a man who dies of weakness at its end)’ (Gaw 1926, p. 105).
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of a whole different order than the conventional simile the first scene of the play presents us with:
And Death’s dishonourable victory We with our stately presence glorify Like captives bound to a triumphant car. (20–2) 70
Both passages style Death as a triumphant Roman general, but it seems unlikely that the author of the above simile and the twelve other gratuitous, often obscure classical allusions in Act 1, was capable of the embedded metaphorical concentration of ‘Triumphant Death, smeared with captivity’. Nowhere in Act 1 do we find metaphor and personification combined in a classical allusion that, instead of being a hollow display of classical learning, appeals poetically to groundling and noble alike. Everything we know of the development of Shakespeare’s style and the styles of his contemporaries over their writing careers conflicts with the notion that such a huge advance in technique could occur over just four acts of the same play. The mentality behind the use of classical allusion in some of the above citations from Act 4 is quite simply absent from the rest of the play. A much more straightforward allusion to Hercules, grandson of Alcaeus and hence also called, as he is here, ‘Alcides’, appears at 4.7.60. A Literature Online search reveals that Shakespeare refers to the demigod nearly fifty times in his plays. Eighteen lines later Lucy calls Talbot the ‘black Nemesis’ of the French. Nemesis was
70 Thomson does note that the earlier allusion is inaccurate, in that ‘the captives were not bound to the victor’s car but preceded it’, which further complicates matters (Thomson 1952, p. 84).
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the Greek goddess who meted out divine punishment and this is her sole appearance in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. The scene, and with it the act in the traditional division, draws to a close with Lucy promising that even though the Talbots are no more, the French victory will be short-lived:
But from their ashes shall be reared A phoenix that shall make all France afeard. (92–3)
In his Metamorphoses, Ovid retells the ancient story of the mystical Arabian bird that, every five hundred years, died in a pyre of its own making from which its progeny arose. 71 Act 5 contains no classical allusions unrecorded by Thomson. The three he identifies come in the last three scenes of the play; they are clearly signposted and name some of the best known Greek mythological figures: Circe, the Minotaur, and Paris. Circe reappears only once elsewhere in the Shakespeare canon, in The Comedy of Errors (V.i.271); the Minotaur never. There is nothing in Act 5 to match the ostentatious obscurities of Act 1. Over the entire play then, I find a further fourteen classical allusions unmentioned by Thomson. The table on the following page reveals how inaccurate my interpretations would have been had I assumed Thomson’s citations were complete totals for each act.
71
See Hattaway 1990, p. 162.
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Table 6: Distribution of classical allusions in 1 Henry VI
Act (Trad. Division)
1
2
3
4
5
Thomson
10
1
0
1
3
Total
13
4
1
8
3
Most strikingly, the totals for Acts 2 and 4 have increased by 400 and 800 percent respectively. But while the Act 2 additions closely resemble those in Acts 1, 3 and 5 in their conventional execution, four of those in Act 4 are, by comparison, embedded in the surrounding dialogue and deployed with subtlety and dramatic realism. None of the additions to the totals of the remaining acts are of this kind; nor are any of the allusions in those acts identified by Thomson. After a thorough investigation of all the classical allusions in the play, it is clear that two acts stand out as exceptional for different reasons. Act 1, anomalous in so many other ways already identified and in others yet to be, contains just three fewer allusions than the rest of the play combined. They are mostly expansive similes and frequently refer to obscure classical figures, places or objects never again mentioned in the Shakespeare canon. In 1.6, which runs to a mere thirty-one lines, there are no less than four of these obscurities. 72 Two of the allusions found at the end of the play, to Nemesis (4.7.78) and the Minotaur (5.3.189), while they are certainly not obscure, never reappear in
72
Thomson, p. 86; Wilson 1952a, pp. 135–7.
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Shakespeare’s works. Act 4 is seen to present some of its allusions so subtly that Thomson overlooked them: the embedded references to Bellona in 4.2 and to Prometheus/Tityus in 4.3 have no precedent in his citations from the plays he discusses before 1 Henry VI. With respect to classical allusion, there is a combining intelligence at work in Act 4—and only this act—striving for psychological realism in poetic expression. One looks in vain for writing of this calibre in the plays of Shakespeare’s early contemporaries.
4.6.3 Biblical Allusions A huge amount of literature is dedicated to the biblical references in Shakespeare’s plays, but no critic discusses their distribution in 1 Henry VI specifically. For my own comparison, I have used Hattaway’s New Cambridge edition of the play, for two important reasons. As I made clear at the start of this chapter, Hattaway is staunchly convinced of Shakespeare’s sole authorship and so the biblical allusions he identifies in his commentary have been collected without the bias an editor looking for signs of collaboration might have brought to the text: this is the first reason. The second is that, unlike classical allusions, which are generally black and white as to who or what is being alluded to, biblical allusions often inhabit grey areas due to the centrality of the Bible to the origins and evolution of the English language. A case could conceivably be made for every single word of 1 Henry VI alluding in some way to God’s word in its various translations and versions. Naseeb Shaheen, one of the most exhaustive and conscientious scholars of biblical references in Shakespeare, employs a system in order to ‘indicate whether a
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reference is certain, probable or possible’. 73 In practice this leads to no less than four categories and includes liturgical references as well, which further complicate matters. I have endeavoured to make my own ‘system’ as transparent as possible. Hattaway generally quoted chapter and verse when he identified an allusion in the text, and I reproduce his references below, which he keyed to the Geneva version of 1560. He fails to do so on one occasion (1.3.39–40) where the text directly alludes to very well known biblical figures (Cain and Abel), and I have therefore supplied the reference myself. I include a table summarising the distribution of the allusions identified by Hattaway.
Act 1: 1.1.10–2 dragon’s fire Rev. 12.3 ff. 1.1.28 King of Kings Rev. 19.16. 1.1.29 dreadful judgement-day Rev 6.12–17. 1.1.31 battles of the Lord of Hosts he fought 1 Sam. 25.28, Isa. 13.4. 1.1.67 yield the ghost Acts 5.10. 1.2.26 weary…life Eccles. 2.17. 1.2.27–8 like…prey Ps. 17.12. 1.2.33 Samsons Judges 14 ff. 1.2.33 Goliases 1 Sam. 17. 1.2.105 Deborah Judges 4–5. 1.2.141 eagle Ps. 103.5. 1.2.143 Saint Philip’s daughters Acts 21.9. 1.2.144 Bright star of Venus, fall’n down on the earth Isa. 14.12.
73 Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), p. 26.
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1.2.144–5 ‘Compare the Ephesians’ idolatrous worship of the image of Diana “which came down from Jupiter.”’ Acts 19.35. 1.3.8 answer…Protector John 18.22. 1.3.39–40 This be Damascus…cursed Cain…brother Abel Gen. 4.8–12. 1.3.55 wolf…array Matt. 7.15. 1.3.56 scarlet hypocrite Rev 17.3–4. 1.5.9 hell…prevail Matt. 16.18. 1.5.13 thy…come John 7:30. 1.6.3 performed her word 1 Kings 8.20. Total: 21
Act 2: 2.1.26 God…fortress 2 Sam. 22.2. 2.3.7–10 Great…reports 1 Kings 10.6–7, 2 Chron. 9.5–6. 2.4.76 fashion John 1.1.142. 2.4.108 blood-drinking John 3.1.341–2. 2.5.8–9 These eyes…exigent 1 Sam. 3.2. 2.5.21 my…satisfied Isa. 53.10–11. 2.5.103 And like a mountain, not to be removed Ps. 125.1, Isa. 54.10. 2.5.116 pilgrimage Gen. 47.9. Total: 8
Act 3: 3.1.20 thy profession 1 Tim. 3.2–7. 3.1.129 And will not you maintain the thing you teach Rom. 2.2.1. 3.1.196 Was in the mouth of every sucking babe Ps. 8.2, Matt. 21.16. 3.2.44 darnel Matt.13. 3.2.110–11 Now, quiet soul…overthrow Luke 2.29–30. 3.2.112 What is the trust or strength of foolish man? Jer. 17.5. 3.2.117 Yet heavens have glory for this victory Ps. 115.1.
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3.3.42 let…thee 1 Sam. 25.24. Total: 8
Act 4: 4.1.192 ’Tis much when scepters are in children’s hands Eccl. 10.16. 4.2.27 pale Rev. 6.8. 4.4.18 bloody sweat Luke 20.44. 4.7.3 smeared with captivity Eph. 4.8. Total: 4
Act 5: 5.3.6 monarch of the north Isa. 14.13. 5.3.10 familiar spirits 1 Sam. 28.8. 5.4.39–53 Virtuous…gates of heaven Luke 1, Matt. 12.24, 27. 5.4.43–5 But you…blood of innocents Ezek. 23.17, 37. 5.4.63 fruit…womb Ps. 127.3, Gen. 30.2. 5.4.89 But darkness and the gloomy shade of death Matt. 4.16. Total: 6
Table 7: Distribution of biblical allusions in 1 Henry VI
Act (Traditional Division)
Number of Biblical Allusions
1
21
2
8
3
8
4
4
5
6
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Yet again Act 1 is emphatically distinguished from the rest of the play—it contains just five fewer biblical allusions than the combined total for Acts 2–5. Moreover, Act 1 is the only act to name biblical characters (other than God or Satan) and locations specifically. Therein we find ‘Samsons’, ‘Goliases’, ‘Deborah’, ‘Saint Philip’s daughters’, ‘Cain’ and ‘Abel’, as well as ‘Damascus’. Why would a playwright change the rate and nature of his biblical allusions so radically between Acts 1 and 2, especially if, as most critics believe, the whole play was composed at the same time? Such a high density of localised specificity is most readily explained by the hypothesis that the author who wrote Act 1 of 1 Henry VI did not write the rest of the play. Act 1, which has been repeatedly shown to be the least Shakespearean of the play, exhibits nearly six times as many biblical allusions as Act 4, the part of the play traditionally thought to be the most Shakespearean.
4.6.4 Grammatical Inversion The bibliographical and linguistic evidence against Shakespeare’s authorship of Act 1 is compelling, and stylistically, the work of Z has received the severest criticism from scholars, some of whom found it incredible that Shakespeare could have written it. 74 Marco Mincoff, the twentieth century’s most cogent and sensitive commentator on the quality of the writing in 1 Henry VI, found his faith in Shakespeare’s sole authorship severely tested by Act 1’s mediocrity:
74
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s damning remarks are quoted in this section below.
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If this is Shakespeare at all—and one may be forgiven for doubting it—it is Shakespeare from a period with which we are not familiar….The whole of Act I bears traces of the same primitive style… 75
Mincoff goes into greater detail in his chapter on the poetics of Shakespeare’s early history plays in The First Steps, published eleven years after ‘The Composition of Henry VI, Part I’:
Perhaps the most outstanding feature of the style in this act is the high frequency of inversion, more particularly the pre-position of object or predicative without any obvious reason, especially in threats or plans for the future: “Wounds will I lend the French instead of eyes” (I i 87), “Your hearts I’ll stamp out with my horse’s heels” (I iv 107), “His ransom there is none but I shall pay” (I i 148). In scenes i and iv lines with such inversions reach to over 12 per cent, and though they drop to a little over 3 per cent in scene iii, the examples there are entirely typical: “Thy scarlet robes, as a child’s bearing cloth, I’ll use” (I iii 43), “Thee I’ll chase hence” (55), “Thy heart-blood I will have” (82). In the first two scenes of Act II these inversions disappear altogether, and they occur only very rarely in the rest of the play, as they may appear occasionally in much riper works of Shakespeare’s, though obviously he had come to regard them as stagy and bombastic, assigning them to Pistol as a speech characteristic. In themselves, of course, they are not of much importance, but their high frequency in the first act is a sort of index of the general stiltedness of the style. 76
75
Mincoff, 1965, p. 283. Mincoff, 1976, pp. 70–1. Mincoff’s discussion of another, comparatively inconsequential, variable: the number and length of ‘tirades’ in the three Henry VI plays and Richard III is much fuller. He defines a tirade ‘quite arbitrarily, as a speech of thirty lines or over’ (p. 69). Nobody appears to have conducted such an analysis before. Mincoff establishes that the number of tirades increases from seven in 1 Henry VI to ten in Richard III, while the average speech length drops from 4.8 to 3.4 lines. He concentrates more on the general rather than on the particular at the start of his chapter but it is uncharacteristic of him not to go on and fully catalogue the grammatical inversions in 1 Henry VI after such a meticulous counting of the speech lengths in all four early histories. 76
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Mincoff was of course unaware of the full extent to which Taylor would be able to separate Act 1 from the rest of the play. The above remarks appear to strengthen Taylor’s argument that the author of Act 1 did not write anything else in 1 Henry VI but only a complete analysis will reveal exactly how much Act 1 differs from the rest of the play with respect to grammatical inversion. Taylor did not follow up on Mincoff’s observations but they inspired me to chart its distribution throughout the play. Below I list all the examples of inversion in 1 Henry VI where the direct object (o) comes before the verb (v) or where the subject (s) comes after the verb. Indirect object inversions have not been included, except in the case of passive constructions, where they constitute the only object in the sentence. Inversions around the verb ‘to be’ have been excluded, along with instances of simple auxiliary inversion (for example, ‘Here will I sit’). Imperative and interrogative constructions have also been omitted. Because inversion is grammatical and follows grammatical rules, it is possible to achieve a high level of accuracy with the counts; a sentence is either inverted in one of the above ways or it is not. A table summarising the distribution of inversion in the play follows my scene-by-scene analysis.
Act 1, scene 1 (177 lines): [s/v]‘Hung be the heavens’(1); [o/v] ‘Virtue he had’(9); [s/v] ‘mourn we not’(17); [o/v] ‘victory / We…glorify’(21); [o/v] ‘The battles of the Lord of Hosts he fought’(31); [o/v] ‘None do you like’(35); [o/v] ‘Whom like a schoolboy you may overawe’(36); [o/v] ‘to church thou go’st’(42); [o/v] ‘thy ghost I invocate’(52); [o/v] ‘A far more glorious star thy soul will make’(55); [o/v; s/v] ‘Sad tidings bring I’(58); [o/v] ‘By guileful fair words
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peace may be obtained’(77); [s/v] ‘Cropped are the flower-de-luces’(80); [o/v] ‘Me they concern’(84); [o/v] ‘Wounds will I lend(87); [o/v] ‘with him is joined’(93); [o/v] ‘an army have I mustered’(101); [o/v] ‘By three and twenty thousand of the French/Was round encompassèd (113–4); [o/v] ‘No leisure had he’(115); [o/v] ‘sharp stakes plucked out of hedges/They pitched’(117-18); [o/v] ‘Hundreds he sent to hell’(123); [s/v] ‘Enclosed were they with their enemies’(136); [o/v] ‘Four of their lords I’ll change for one of ours’(151); [o/v] ‘to my task will I’(152); [o/v] ‘Bonfires in France forthwith I am to make’(153); [o/v] ‘Ten thousand soldiers with me I will take’(155); [o/v] ‘oaths to Henry sworn’(162); [o/v] ‘To Eltham will I’(170); [o/v/] ‘for his safety there I’ll best devise’(172); [o/v] ‘The king from Eltham I intend to steal’(176). Total: 30
Act 1, scene 2 (150 lines): [s/v] ‘Remaineth none’(15); [o/v] ‘Nor men nor money hath he’(17); [o/v] ‘Him I forgive my death’(20); [o/v] ‘England all Olivers and Rolands bred’(30); [o/v] ‘For none but Samsons and Goliases / It sendeth forth to skirmish’(33); [o/v] ‘The walls they’ll tear down’(40); [o/v] ‘with me I bring’(51); [o/v] ‘by a vision sent to her from heaven/Ordained is to raise’(52–3); [o/v] ‘The spirit of deep prophecy she hath’(55); [o/v] ‘What’s past and what’s to come she can descry’(57); [o/v] ‘Heaven and our Lady gracious hath it pleased’(74); [o/v] ‘Her aid she promised’(82); [o/v] ‘That beauty am I blest with’(86); [o/v] ‘My courage try by combat’(89); [o/v] ‘Out of a great deal of old iron I chose forth’(101); [o/v] ‘My heart and hands thou hast as once subdued’(109); [o/v] ‘What she says, I’ll confirm’(128), [s/v] ‘Assigned am I’(129); [o/v] ‘the siege assuredly I’ll raise’(130); [s/v] ‘Dispersed are the glories’(137); [o/v] ‘Thou with an eagle art inspired’(141); [o/v]‘No prophet will I trust’(150). Total: 22
Act 1, scene 3 (89 lines):
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[o/v] ‘Thy scarlet robes…/ I’ll use to carry thee out’(42-3); [o/v] ‘Thee I’ll chase’(55); [o/v] ‘Thy heart-blood I will have’(81); [o/v] ‘these nobles should such stomachs bear’(88). Total: 4
Act 1, scene 4 (110 lines): [o/v] ‘have the suburbs won’(2); [o/v] ‘Something I must do’(7); [o/v] ‘A piece of ordnance ’gainst it I have placed’(15); [o/v] ‘For him I was exchanged and ransomed’(28); [s/v] ‘redeemed I was’(33); [s/v] ‘produced they me’(39); [s/v] ‘Here, said they’(41); [s/v] ‘Then broke I’(43); [o/v] ‘a guard of chosen shot I had’(52); [o/v] ‘Henry the Fifth he first trained to the wars’(78); ‘with one Joan la Pucelle joined’(100); [o/v] ‘Your hearts I’ll stamp out’(107). Total: 11
Act 1, scene 5 (39 lines): [o/v] ‘Blood will I draw on thee’(6); [o/v] ‘My breast I’ll burst’(10); [o/v] ‘So bees…/Are from their hives and houses driven away’(23–4). Total: 3
Act 1, scene 6 (31 lines): [s/v] ‘Rescued is Orléans’(2); [s/v] ‘Recovered is the town of Orléans’(9); [o/v] ’Tis Joan, not we, by whom the day is won’(17); [o/v] ‘A statelier pyramis to her I’ll rear’(21). Total: 3
Act 2, scene 1 (81 lines): [o/v] ‘If any noise or soldier you perceive’(2); [s/v] Ne’er heard I of a warlike enterprise’(44). Total: 2
Act 2, scene 2 (60 lines):
212
[o/v] ‘With modesty admiring thy renown/By me entreats, great lord, thou wouldst vouchsafe’(39–40). Total: 1
Act 2, scene 3 (81 lines): Total: 0
Act 2, scene 4 (133 lines): ‘For pale they look with fear’(63); [o/v] ‘For these my friends in spite of thee shall wear’(106). Total: 2
Act 2, scene 5 (129 lines) [s/v] ‘So fare my limbs’(4); [o/v] ‘This loathsome sequestration have I had’(25); [o/v] ‘I no issue have’(94); [s/v] ‘therefore haste I’(127). Total: 4
Act 3, scene 1 (200 lines): Total: 0
Act 3, scene 2 (137 lines): [s/v] ‘gather we our forces’(102). Total: 1
Act 3, scene 3 (91 lines): [o/v] ‘this doth Joan devise’(17). Total: 1
Act 3, scene 4 (45 lines): Total: 0
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Act 4, scene 1 (194 lines): [o/v] ‘This shall ye do’(8); [s/v] ‘Well didst thou’(182). Total: 2
Act 4, scene 2 (56 lines): Total: 0
Act 4, scene 3 (53 lines): [o/v; s/v] ‘By your espials were discovered/Two mightier troops’(6–7); [o/v] ‘they each other cross’(52). Total: 2
Act 4, scene 4 (46 lines): [o/v] ‘This expedition was by York and Talbot / Too rashly plotted’(2–3); [o/v] ‘our general force / Might with a sally of the very town / Be buckled with (3–5); [s/v] ‘For fly he could not’(43); [s/v] ‘fly would Talbot never’(44). Total: 4
Act 4, scene 5 (55 lines): [o/v] ‘that no exploit have done’(27); [o/v] ‘Than can yourself yourself in twain divide’(49); [s/v] ‘For live I will not’(51). Total: 3
Act 4, scene 6 (57 lines): [o/v] ‘blood I spill of thine’(22); [o/v] ‘purposing the Bastard to destroy’(25); [o/v] ‘they nothing gain’(36); [o/v] ‘young Talbot from old Talbot fly’(46). Total: 4
Act 4, scene 7 (96 lines):
214
[o/v] ‘His bloody sword he brandished’(6); [o/v] ‘that two-and-fifty kingdoms hath’(73); [o/v] ‘were mine eye-balls into bullets turned’(79). Total: 3
Act 5, scene 1 (62 lines): [o/v] ‘Which by my Lord of Winchester we mean / Shall be transported’ (39–40). Total: 1
Act 5, scene 2 (21 lines): Total: 0
Act 5, scene 3 (195 lines): [s/v] ‘Changed to a worser shape thou canst not be’(36); [o/v] ‘those two counties I will undertake / Your grace shall…enjoy’(158–9); [o/v] ‘good wishes, praise, and prayers / Shall Suffolk ever have’(173–4); [o/v] ‘a pure unspotted heart /…I send the king’(182–3). Total: 4
Act 5, scene 4 (175 lines): [o/v] ‘little shall the Frenchmen gain thereby’(115). Total: 1
Act 5, scene 5 (108 lines): [o/v] ‘with a lady of so high resolve/As is fair Margaret he be linked’(75–6). Total: 1
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Table 8: Distribution of grammatical inversion in 1 Henry VI Act (Trad. Division)
Number of Lines
Number of Inversions
Rate of Occurrence
1
596
73
1 every 8.2 lines
2
484
9
1 every 53.8 lines
3
473
2
1 every 236.5 lines
4
557
18
1 every 30.9 lines
5
561
7
1 every 80.1 lines
The results make very interesting reading. Mincoff’s curtailed summary of the distribution of grammatical inversion in the play fails to convey the full extent of its variation. Of the 109 instances of the targeted kinds of inversions in 1 Henry VI, 73, or two thirds, are found in Act 1. Even more astonishing is the fact that the first scene of Act 1 alone exhibits only six fewer inversions than the combined total for Acts 2–5. The fact that Acts 3 and 5 have the lowest inversion rates would appear to further support Taylor’s ascription of those acts and only those acts to his Author Y, but the total for Act 2 (nine) is close to that for Act 5 (seven). The parts of the play currently attributed to X (Act 2 and 4.2–7.32) contain twenty-three inversions. It should be noted that eight of the inversions in these scenes occur in extended sequences of rhymed couplets (4.5.13–4.7.32), where the additional formal restriction could well have increased the author’s normal rate of inversion. The distribution of this variable alone makes it very hard to believe that one author wrote the whole play in a single, limited period. The author of Act 1 relied heavily, almost obsessively, on grammatical inversion when constructing his verse. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, although he did not identify this stylistic fingerprint, was
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convinced that the verse of the opening speech of 1 Henry VI did not originate with Shakespeare:
Hung be the heavens with black! Yield, day, to night! Comets, importing change of times and states, Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky, And with them scourge the bad revolting stars That have consented unto Henry’s death: King Henry the Fifth, too famous to live long! England ne’er lost a king of so much worth.
Bedford’s opening sentence is grammatically inverted and foreshadows the playwright’s preoccupation with the device. Coleridge addresses his readers thus:
Read aloud any two or three passages in blank verse even from Shakespeare’s earliest dramas, as Love’s Labour’s Lost, or Romeo and Juliet; and then read in the same way this speech, with especial attention to the metre; and if you do not feel the impossibility of the latter having been written by Shakespeare, all I dare suggest is, that you may have ears,—for so has another animal,—but an ear you cannot have, me judice. 77
Charting the distribution of grammatical inversion in the play enables us to move from ear-based judgements of verse quality, like that of Coleridge, towards a more objective assessment of just why the verse of one playwright flows and sounds unlike that of another. The next section examines the metrical fingerprints of 1 Henry VI in an effort to further objectify our understanding of Shakespeare’s early versification.
77
T. M. Raysor, Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1930), i, 141.
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4.7 The Prosody of 1 Henry VI It is no exaggeration to state that the understanding of the prosody of Shakespeare’s plays and poems is now at its lowest ever ebb. One encounters the word ‘prosody’ very seldom in contemporary Shakespearean scholarship, and many critics seem unfamiliar with its meaning. Of those who are, most consider the study of the metrical structure of verse to be a relic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ obsession with cataloguing every aspect of Shakespeare’s language. Certainly that obsession led to the devising and application of metrical tests that were carried out in undisciplined ways. As Chapter 2 documented, Fleay devised tests still used today, but by presenting inaccurate figures and suppressing unfavourable data, the ‘dogmatic pioneer’ and his successors tarnished the reputation of metrical tests as stylistic discriminators. The stigma attached to the study of prosody in the twenty-first century is based largely on ignorance: ignorance not only of the nature of modern metrical tests but of metre itself. Few scholars show an awareness of the fact that the analysis of Shakespeare’s prosody has given us one of the most accurate means of establishing the chronology of his works. In the decades since the appearance of Ants Oras’s definitive study, Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: An Experiment in Prosody (1960), only a small group of critics have emphasised how important an understanding of Shakespeare’s prosody is to our understanding of his literary achievement. 78
78 See Marina Tarlinskaja, Shakespeare's Verse: Iambic Pentameter and the Poet's Idiosyncrasies (New York: Peter Lang, 1987); George T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California UP, 1988) and especially Jackson 2003, pp. 59–72; 84–95.
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The ability to manipulate groups of words with respect to their speech stresses and syntax over an underlying metrical rhythm—with Shakespeare this was predominantly iambic pentameter—was essential to becoming a recognised poet in Shakespeare’s day. Metrical structure was at the heart of every poem and every play he wrote; so much so that in many of his works we find characters discoursing on ‘poesy’ or ‘numbers’, mostly at the expense of another’s poor poetic prowess, or suspect prosody. 79 Prosody mattered to Shakespeare and it ought to matter to interpreters of his work. It was more than the backbone of his poetry; it was the entire skeleton. If we fail to consider the importance of this skeleton to the body of his poetic achievement, we are left with, at best, an amorphous understanding of his unique use of the English language. But what are the factors that affect the way verse sounds and, more to the point, help to distinguish authorial habits? We have seen already how a playwright’s grammar can influence the flow of his verse. The amount of grammatical inversion in Act 1 of 1 Henry VI is so disproportionate to the rest of the play that it is impossible to conclude that a single author wrote the entire play during the same period. Similarly, a purely metrical variable like the number of feminine, or double endings that a playwright includes among his standard iambic pentameters has been extremely effective in distinguishing one author from another. A relatively high density of lines that end with an extra, unstressed eleventh syllable changes the flow and movement of the verse, adding variation to the strict ‘ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum’ rhythm of
79 Holofernes tells Nathaniel in Love’s Labour’s Lost: ‘Here are only numbers ratified, but for the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy, caret [it is lacking] (IV.ii.121–3). In As You Like It, Celia, after reading Orlando’s verses to Rosalind asks her cousin ‘Didst thou hear these verses?’, to which Rosalind replies ‘O yes, I heard them all, and more too, for some of them had in them more feet than the verses would bear (III.ii.163–6). Rosalind’s response is in prose, but ‘for some of them had in them’ is obviously intended to mimic the poorly ratified numbers of Orlando’s ‘poetry’.
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regular iambic pentameters. Taylor refers to the analysis of feminine endings as ‘the simplest and most reliable of all verse tests’. 80 Philip Timberlake, in the most comprehensive and accurate study of feminine endings in Elizabethan verse ever published, demonstrates that Shakespeare used this metrical variation more frequently than any other dramatist of the 1580s and 1590s. 81 I reproduce on the following page Taylor’s table of the feminine endings in 1 Henry VI, having adjusted his Oxford scene divisions to those in Hattaway’s traditionally-divided New Cambridge edition, the default edition for the present study. Taylor excludes all incomplete verse lines, rhymed verse, and lines in which the final word is syllabically ambiguous (‘heaven’, ‘spirit’, and so on). The reliability of the test diminishes with smaller samples, but here we have over two thousand complete blank verse lines and many of the scenes are over a hundred lines long, which increases the validity of the calculated percentages. As Taylor observes, we can identify strong trends in the results: the author of Act 3 (Y in Taylor’s division) can be easily distinguished from the author of Act 1 (Z) who used more than twice as many feminine endings on average. Only one scene in Act 3 achieves a percentage as high as the lowest percentage in Act 1. Another pattern emerges in the scenes of the play attributed to X. While a certain amount of fluctuation in the use of feminine endings can be expected in an author’s work, the percentages of Act 2 cannot realistically be thus accounted for. As we have seen, the Rose Plucking scene (2.4) is regarded by critics as the most Shakespearean of the play on stylistic grounds and it returns a percentage fully six times the average of the
80 81
Taylor 1995, p.164 and p. 202, n. 40. Timberlake 1931.
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Table 9: Taylor’s analysis of feminine endings in 1 Henry VI, adjusted to Hattaway’s division
Act and Scene
Lines
Feminine endings (Percentage)
1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6
174 145 82 106 38 29
4 7 9 12 15 10
1 (total)
574
8
2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5
80 59 78 129 129
3 3 8 24 3
2 (excluding 2.4)
346
4
3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4
195 128 90 45
3 4 3 0
3 (total)
458
3
4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7.1–32 4.7.33–96
190 49 34 42 13 — — 44
6 14 24 26 15 82 — — 11
4.2–4.7.32
138
22
5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5
62 20 192 174 107
11 0 3.6 6 1
5 (total)
555
4.5
82
Taylor counts one feminine ending in 4.5.1–13 but there are in fact two: ‘danger’(8) and ‘mother’(13).
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four other scenes in Act 2, and triple the percentage of the next highest scene in the act. The only other scenes in the play where similarly high percentages are found are those that make up the Bordeaux sequence, 4.2–7. Of the 138 lines of blank verse in that section, 22 percent have feminine endings, a figure very compatible with the 24 percent over the 129 lines of 2.4. This means that for the scenes most confidently assigned to Shakespeare on other grounds, (2.4 and 4.2–4.7.32, or 267 blank verse lines), the overall proportion of feminine endings is 23 percent. Taylor concludes:
The use of feminine endings in blank verse lines thus usefully confirms the distinctions already established between act 3 (3 percent), act 1 (8 percent) and Shakespeare (23 percent). Moreover, in this as in other respects act 5 (4.5 percent) most closely resembles act 3 (3 percent), although act 5 contains more fluctuation from scene to scene than act 3. Nevertheless, the use of feminine endings makes clear enough—even if we had no other evidence—that no significant portion of act 5 was written by the author of II.iv and the Bordeaux sequence in act 4. 83
One must not forget however, that the extended passages of rhyming couplets in the Bordeaux sequence (4.5.13–55, 4.6.2–57, and 4.7.1–50) total 148 lines, ten more than the total of blank verse lines in the same section of the play. While the blank verse of 4.2–4.7.32 certainly has a Shakespearean frequency of feminine endings, this particular metrical test can in no way add to our understanding of who wrote most of the verse in the Bordeaux sequence. The internal evidence assembled in Chapter 2 emphatically disproves Taylor’s notion of 4.2–4.7.32 being a ‘single dramatic unit’,
83
Taylor 1995, p. 166.
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and it is interesting to note that this is the only attribution test Taylor applies to 1 Henry VI for which he provides scene-by-scene results. Before—and not after—presenting the telling evidence from his analysis of the feminine endings in 1 Henry VI, Taylor enlists the conclusions of Mincoff, the most sensitive critic on the structure and style of the play, to help him strip away scenes 2.1–3 and 2.5 from his Author X, who duly becomes ‘Shakespeare?’. As Chapter 2 showed, the Rose Plucking scene (2.4) and the Bordeaux sequence (4.2–7), distinguish themselves in a multitude of ways from their surroundings. It seems strange, however, that Taylor should turn to Mincoff—an ‘absolutist’ scholar, no less—for endorsement of a modification to his division of shares before revealing his most impressive evidence for the extent of Shakespeare’s contribution to 1 Henry VI. His separation of 2.1–3 and 2.5 is made largely on the basis of the conclusions of a scholar who—and this becomes obscured in Taylor’s discussion—maintained that the entire play was Shakespearean. Taylor ought to have presented his essential evidence for the distribution of feminine endings in 1 Henry VI before making this significant adjustment to his authorship hypothesis. The work of Ants Oras has had a profound impact on not only our understanding of Shakespeare’s prosody, but also on the vexed question of the chronology of his works. In his comprehensive statistical study, Oras shows that Shakespeare, compared to most of his contemporaries in the early 1590s, inserted fewer strong pauses or caesuras (marked by colons, semicolons, question marks, exclamations, dashes, or full stops) after the fifth syllable of his iambic pentameters. Because of the huge scope of his study, Oras is able to demonstrate that 1 Henry VI is one of only five plays in the Shakespeare canon that contain more strong pauses after the fifth syllable than after the sixth. Apart from The Comedy of Errors (in which the 223
difference between the total pauses after the fifth and sixth syllables is only one), Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King John all belong to Shakespeare’s ‘lyrical’ period—roughly 1595–6—and fit comfortably into the curve of Shakespeare’s prosodic development. The pause patterns of 1 Henry VI on the other hand are completely anomalous with those of plays thought to have been composed around the same time. The play has the highest percentage of strong pauses after the fourth syllable and the lowest percentage of such pauses after the sixth in the canon. 84 Taylor shows however that the anomaly effectively disappears when Oras’s figures for the play are split into those for the scenes he attributes to ‘Shakespeare?’ and those for the rest of the play.
Table 10: Oras’s verse pause patterns in 1 Henry VI keyed to the traditional division
2.4, 4.2–4.7.32
Rest of Play
Strong pause after 4th
8
72
Strong pause after 5th
5
30
Strong pause after 6th
7
21
Oras’s graphical representations of the pauses in Shakespeare’s early plays all show a characteristic ‘valley’ pattern; there is a clear dip between the peak frequencies for the fourth and sixth syllables. We see that trend repeated here in 2.4 and 4.2–7.32, whereas the rest of the play exhibits the steady downward slope typical of most of the playwrights writing in the 1580s and 1590s. As Taylor remarks, this contrast in metrical practice is not enough in itself to prove Shakespeare did not write the rest of
84 Taylor mistakenly writes ‘[i]n fact, it has the highest percentage of pauses after the fifth syllable’ (Taylor 1995, p. 166). The highest percentage is, in fact, registered by 1 Henry VI’s pauses after the fourth syllable.
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play, but it is another indicator that 2.4 and 4.2–4.7.32 are more characteristic of Shakespeare than any other scenes in the play. But again we see Taylor assuming the entire Bordeaux sequence is by the same playwright, even though he has just convincingly demonstrated that Act 2 is of mixed authorship. His insistence on treating 4.2–7.32 as a ‘single dramatic unit’ is linked to his tendency to see the play as one of acts rather than one of scenes. The Bordeaux sequence is, in many ways, the most problematic part of F, and exhibits far more evidence of mixed authorship than his division allows for. As well as charting differences in metrical practice across the play as a whole, on a line-by-line basis, scholars have identified localised variation in the scansion of some of the proper names in the text. ‘Orleanes’ must be pronounced disyllabically in the traditional Act 4 (4.4.26, 4.6.14, 16, 42), as it must be in the five other occurrences of the word in verse in Shakespeare. 85 Elsewhere in 1 Henry VI the word is predominantly trisyllabic (1.1.60, 111, 157; 1.2.6, 125, 148; 1.4.58; 1.5.13; 1.6.2, 9; 2.2.15; 3.3.69), and only twice unmistakably disyllabic (1.1.93, 1.4.1). It is most unlikely that Shakespeare was responsible for all of the trisyllabic variants, having never so scanned the word in three other plays. The trisyllabic scansion of ‘Hecate’ at 3.2.64 is non-Shakespearean, as mentioned earlier. Shakespeare has the witch goddess appear in verse once in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V.i.384) and three times in Macbeth (II.i.52, III.ii.41, and III.v.1), all of which scan disyllabically. One metrical variation in the play appears to have been overlooked by commentators: the presence or absence of split lines of blank verse, where one iambic pentameter is split between two or more speakers. I have restricted my counts to
85
2 Henry VI (I.i.7); Henry V (II.iv.5, III.v.41, and IV.viii.76), and Henry VIII (II.iv.175).
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include only lines of ten or eleven syllables—it is sometimes difficult to decide whether the author meant the exchange to be in verse or prose, so I have left out the ambiguous instances. Of the 591 verse lines in Act 1, not one is shared. In stark contrast, the first sixty-six lines of 2.1 yield three examples (ll. 21, 33 and 66). There are a further three examples in 2.3 (ll. 14, 33 and 47) and one at 2.4.64, making a total of seven for the 484 verse lines of the act. Act 3 starts in a similar way to Act 2: there are four examples in the first seventy-four lines of 3.1 (ll. 41, 49, 51, 74), but in the remaining 396 lines of the act, there is not one instance. Act 4 (557 verse lines) has no split lines. Finally, Act 5, running to 560 verse lines, exhibits four shared lines (including one split between three exchanges), all in 5.3 (ll. 114, 120, 132, 141). The table below summarises the distribution:
Table 11: Distribution of split verse lines in 1 Henry VI
Act (Traditional Divisions)
Verse Lines
Split Verse Lines
1
591
0
2
484
7
3
470
4
4
557
0
5
560
4
Verse Lines
Split Verse Lines
2.1
81
3
2.3
77
3
2.4
129
1
3.1
191
4
5.3
192
4
Scene (Traditional Divisions)
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The fifteen split lines in the play are restricted to just five scenes. There is a reinforcement of the clear distinction between Act 1 and the first scene of Act 2 first established by the distribution of round brackets analysed in section 4 above. In 2.3 three split lines appear within thirty-four lines. Taylor’s ‘Shakespeare’ scenes (2.4 and 4.2–4.7.32) register just one instance of a shared line, 2.4.64. The results for Acts 3 and 5 are also significant. All eight examples found in the 1030 verse lines of the two acts fall within two short passages; four in 33 lines of 3.1 and the other four within twenty-seven lines of 5.3. I will continue my analysis of the split verse lines in 1 Henry VI after presenting Taylor’s final division of shares, which, it will be seen, is challenged by the above distribution. At the end of section II of ‘Shakespeare and Others’ Taylor decides to ‘drop the pretense of skeptical question marks and henceforth openly identify the author of II.iv and IV.ii–IV.vii.32 as Shakespeare’. 86 He then re-assembles his authorial variables (including the highly problematic ‘scene divisions’) and introduces his final division of shares:
the more confidently we identify these seven scenes as Shakespeare’s, the more difficult it becomes to attribute to him the rest of act 2, or the beginning of act 4. On the other hand, for reasons already elaborated, the author of those scenes—whom I will henceforth identify as “W”—cannot have been responsible for the rest of the play.
Z (act 1): O, Puzel, -ed, -eth, ne’er, no brackets, here Y (act 3, most of act 5): Oh, Pucelle, Burgonie, scene divisions, ye
86
Taylor 1995, p. 168.
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W (II.i–II.iii, II.v, IV.i): O/Oh, Puzell, Joane., Burgundie 87
The distribution of split verse lines in the play is a useful place to start critiquing Taylor’s final division of shares which, although the target of self-righteous indignation, has not been critically and comprehensively engaged with since its publication. Acts 2, 3, and 5 all contain a high density of split lines in very short passages between 27 and 45 lines long. Such a peculiar distribution is more readily explained by a single author’s idiosyncratic usage of the device rather than by two authors both using it the same way. Two scenes which Taylor separated from his initial X section, 2.1 and 2.3, have this particular distribution of split lines in common with two he attributes to Y (3.1 and 5.3). The next section scrutinises Taylor’s justification for dividing Acts 3 and 5 from scenes 2.1–3, 2.5 and 4.1, and the latter scenes from all of 4.2–4.7.32, and identifies some dropped stitches in the seams of his argument.
4.8 Making Alterations to Taylor’s Pattern Taylor believes that his final division of shares shows that ‘W is clearly differentiated from both Y and Z’. 88 Certainly, Z’s responsibility for Act 1 and only Act 1 has by this stage been proved beyond reasonable doubt. Author Y however, who we are told wrote Act 3 and ‘most of act 5’ (Taylor nowhere expands on this vague ‘most’) has not been sufficiently differentiated from Author W, who as the final author Taylor identifies, is given all the scenes he believes could not have been composed by
87 88
Ibid. Ibid.
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Shakespeare, Y, or Z. Let us take a closer look at the putative authorial habits of Taylor’s W to see whether his existence is justified by the internal evidence. I showed earlier that with regard to the distribution of the ‘O/Oh’ variants in F, Acts 2 and 4 exhibit too few instances to indicate any authorial preference in those sections of the play. The ‘O/Oh’ occurrences across the scenes Taylor ascribes to W (one ‘O’ and one ‘Oh’ in each of 2.5 and 4.1) are too few and too localised for them to be cited as an authorial variable separating all those scenes from the rest of the play. Equally inconclusive is the next authorial variable Taylor believes distinguishes W from the other authors of 1 Henry VI. The ‘Puzell’ at 2.1.20 is unique in the play; it is indeed the only example of the ‘Puz-’ stem outside Act 1 (where it is always spelled ‘Puzel’), but the authorial significance of this singularity is undermined by two factors Taylor does not properly acknowledge. Firstly, again as noted earlier, at 2.1.20 Burgundy is punning on the contrasting meanings which the title the historical Joan bestowed upon herself (‘Pucelle’) had in Elizabethan English. The General Editors of the Arden3 series describe the ‘Puz-’ spelling as ‘a derogatory English alternative’ to the French spelling ‘Pucelle’ meaning ‘the Maid’. 89 This chapter has proved beyond reasonable doubt that the author of Act 1 did not write Act 2. It is quite possible that the author of TLN 698; 2.1.20: ‘But what’s that Puzell whom they tearme so pure?’, used the derogatory English form to indicate to the actor playing Burgundy that it should be pronounced differently from the French form ‘Pucelle’. That the ‘Puc-’ stem appears nowhere in the other ‘W’ scenes is not at all surprising; Joan of Arc does not appear in those scenes. She takes no part in 2.2–5, or in 4.1, and is referred to by name only once in those scenes: Talbot calls her ‘Ioane of Acre’ at TLN 791; 2.2.20.
89
Burns 2000, p. 291.
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One cannot cite a single instance of ‘Puzell’ as significant evidence that W wrote 2.1– 3, 2.5, and 4.1 and nothing else in the play. Taylor’s third authorial marker for W is similarly flawed. While ‘Ioane’ appears by itself as a speech prefix twice and once in a stage direction in 2.1 and only in that scene, Taylor nowhere mentions that ‘Ione’ occurs by itself once in a stage direction and six times in the main body of F’s Actus Quartus, Scæna Tertia (the modern 5.2– 4). Nor does he seem cognisant of the unique ‘Ioane of Acre’ at TLN 791; 2.2.20 resembling the unique ‘Ione of Aire’ at TLN 2689; 5.4.49; the former is thought by both Hattaway and Burns to be the result of a compositorial misreading of ‘Aire’. Later, in section IV of ‘Shakespeare and Others’, long after he has presented his final division of shares, Taylor comments on the ‘Ioane/Ione’ variants in F:
Fleay regarded the spelling distinction between “Ioane” and “Ione” as a significant authorial variant; Hinman demonstrated (incidentally and without even being aware of the significance of his conclusions for the authorship debate) that the pages in which “Ioane” occurs were set by Compositor A, and the pages on which “Ione” occurs by Compositor B. 90
In an endnote Taylor utilises Hinman’s study to show that Compositor A set ‘Ioane’ in 2 Henry VI (TLN 721) and that Compositor B set ‘Ione’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost (TLN 2887, 2896) and in Shrew (TLN 265). 91 He seems unaware, however, that as he refutes Fleay’s argument for the multiple authorship of the play, he refutes part of his own as well. Rather than ‘Joane’ distinguishing the ‘W’ scenes from the rest of the
90 91
Taylor 1995, p. 173. Ibid. p. 202, n. 47.
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play, the presence of ‘Ioane’ by itself in a stage direction only at 2.2.48 SD and ‘Ione’ (which could well have been ‘Ioane’ in Compositor B’s copy) by itself in a stage direction only at 5.4.49 SD actually connects 2.2 with a scene Taylor believes was written by Y. It is surely more likely that such a rare form of stage direction originated with one author rather than two. The apparent compositorial preferences for the different spellings of La Pucelle’s Christian name strengthen the possibility that it was the habit of one author to use ‘Ioane’ or ‘Ione’ by itself in the body text and not two. Keeping in mind that the distribution of the ‘Ioane’ and ‘Ione’ variants in F is likely due to compositorial preferences, we turn to the last of Taylor’s ‘W’ variables: ‘Burgundie’. In my earlier discussion of the distribution of the Burgundy variants in F, I concluded that little significance could be attributed to it in isolation; a state in which, after my analysis of Taylor’s other ‘W’ variables, it now stands. Compositor B’s clear preference for the ‘Burgund-’ form, which is found in Acts 2, 4, and 5 (nowhere in his extensive work on the Folio did he spell the name ‘Burgonie’ as Compositor A did only in Act 3), makes it possible that he changed any instances of ‘Burgonie’ that may have been in his copy for those acts to ‘Burgund-’. As Taylor includes ‘Burgonie’ in his list of distinguishing variables for Y (‘act 3, most of act 5’) he presumably attributes the two instances of the ‘Burgund-’ form in Act 5 to Compositor B’s interference in this manner. By this stage of my analysis it is clear that Taylor provides no incontrovertible evidence for the existence of his Author W. My examination of the ‘Ioane/Ione’ variants in F has revealed comparatively strong evidence for the common authorship
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of 2.1–2 and 5.2–4. When Taylor goes on to distinguish W’s scenes from Shakespeare’s, little if anything is added to our understanding of who wrote what in 1 Henry VI:
W (II.i–II.iii, II.v, IV.i): O/Oh, brackets frequent, infrequent feminine endings, caesura after fifth syllable, trisyllabic Orleans, Henry Shakespeare (II.iv, IV.ii–IV.vii.32): O, brackets rare, frequent feminine endings, caesura after sixth syllable, frequent compound adjectives, disyllabic Orleans, Harry 92
Of the six authorial traits Taylor attributes to W, only one: ‘brackets frequent’, is not equally attributable to Y. Compositor A set twice as many brackets in the ‘W’ scenes (eight) as he did in Acts 3 and 5 (four). This distribution cannot be ignored—the Y scenes total nearly twice as many lines as the ‘W’ ones—but its significance is minimalised by the fact that the other five traits in no way distinguish the two authors. As discussed above, the ‘O/Oh’ instances in W scenes are too few to establish an authorial preference. Taylor records the same percentage of feminine endings (four percent) for the ‘W’ scenes as he does for those written by Y; both W and Y preferred their caesuras after the fifth syllable; both scanned ‘Orleans’ trisyllabically, and both exclusively used ‘Henry’. 93 In the previous section I identified what appears to be an authorial idiosyncrasy connecting two ‘W’ scenes, 2.1 and 2.3, with two Y scenes, 3.1 and 5.3. All of these scenes exhibit clusters of three or four split verse lines in passages between 27 and 45 lines long. This pattern would seem to be most readily explained by the hypothesis
92 93
Ibid. p. 168. Ibid. p. 196, Table 2.
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that one author used the technique of split verse lines habitually in infrequent short, high-density clusters. The distribution of split verse lines, combined with my analysis of the ‘Ioane/Ione’ variants in F above, links the first three scenes of Act 2 closely with the middle three scenes of Act 5, making it seem that, as far as these scenes are concerned, there is no need to posit a fourth author for 1 Henry VI. The first scene of Act 4, which Taylor ascribes to W in ‘Shakespeare and Others’, but possibly to Y in Textual Companion, is especially akin to the Y scenes: it contains only one compound adjective, no classical allusions, one biblical allusion, and two grammatical inversions—figures all perfectly compatible with those for the Y scenes. The scene also has two instances of ‘ye’; the only other occurrence outside Acts 3 and 5 is in 2.2, already linked to Y above. There are three ‘betwixt’s in 4.1, which is the same spelling used in Y’s 3.1 and 5.4. Taylor’s main reason for ascribing 4.1 to W and not to Y is that no less than seventeen pairs of round brackets appear in the scene in F. While Compositor B, who set the scene, has been shown to have set significantly more brackets than Compositor A, he is unlikely to have been the origin of all of the pairs in 4.1. Nevertheless, as an authorial variable this, like all the others Taylor believes distinguishes W from Y, is inconclusive. Bibliographically and linguistically, ‘Shakespeare and Others’ shows that the author of Act 1 apparently wrote nothing else in the play and was not Shakespeare. Taylor is also able to identify and profile Shakespeare’s work on 1 Henry VI more objectively than previous critics. He presents a very strong case for Acts 3 and 5 being non-Shakespearean and of common authorship. But his attribution of the remaining scenes of the play to a fourth author is not at all convincing. Over fifty years ago, from an aesthetics-based and brazenly subjective analysis of the play, Dover Wilson concluded that only three, not four, playwrights were certainly present in 1 Henry VI. 233
A re-examination of his much neglected authorship hypothesis uncovers compelling evidence for Taylor’s Y having authored 2.1–2.3, 2.5 and 4.1, as well as Acts 3 and 5.
4.9 Revisiting Dover Wilson’s Authorship Hypothesis: Prosodic Profiles Dover Wilson, like Malone and Fleay before him, believed himself in possession of a ‘Shakespeare Detector’ by which he could distinguish intuitively but precisely what Shakespeare wrote from what he did not. In his edition of the play he begins his commentary for every scene with his attribution of authorship. Here are two typical ‘Authorship’ paragraphs, with the abbreviation ‘Sh.’ standing for ‘Shakespeare’:
3.1 ‘This scene is quite beyond Greene in dignity and continuity of purpose. But he certainly bore a hand in its construction’ (Hart). I suggest that Sh. copied out a page of Greene’s (ll. 1–63), improving the style as he did so, but left the rest of the scene untouched. Chambers gives the whole to Sh. (doubtfully).
5.4 Chambers thinks ll. 1–93 Peele’s, the rest poss. Sh.’s; Hart assigns the whole to Sh. (with poss. help from Peele); I suggest a rapid rewriting by Sh. of all but the twenty lines at the beginning and another twenty to thirty at the end; the orig. being prob. Greene’s like the rest of the act, though ll. 1–93 may be Nashe’s. 94
94
Wilson 1952a, pp. 153, 200.
234
Since his edition, no major editor of the play has attempted anything like the above in his commentary. Dover Wilson even went so far as to present what is really a ‘Statement of Attributional Intent’, which makes it absolutely clear that he considers his appreciation of the dramatic verse of the early 1590s sufficient in itself to decide who authored the play. He states:
(i) that I set down without hesitation as non-Shakespearian all lines or passages in halting, forced or prosaic verse, and all the imagery which is hazy, muddled or tawdry, while if such passages exhibit, as they generally do, clear parallels with Greene’s work, I feel confident they belong to him; (ii) that, on the other hand, I accept as Shakespeare’s all verse, whether end-stopped or overrun, which flows freely, with the evident pulse of a powerful mind behind it, and runs to figures honestly imagined and clearly envisaged, even if at times they are elaborately conceited; (iii) and, finally, that I regard passages in free-moving Shakespearian verse which nevertheless contain favourite words, phrases or allusions of Greene’s as the result of a rapid revising that followed the basic text fairly closely. 95
Examination of Dover Wilson’s commentaries for the Henry VI plays reveals hundreds of citations of parallels from the works of Shakespeare, Greene, Nashe, Marlowe and Peele and many other contemporary authors, indicating that he had read more widely and more perceptively than his predecessors. His attributions for each scene, however, only match those of H. C. Hart, who edited the play for the first Arden series in 1908 (a second, revised edition appeared in 1930), for eleven of the
95
Ibid. p. xlii.
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play’s twenty-seven scenes. 96 There can be no more stark demonstration of the limitations of subjective assessments of internal evidence: the two most thorough parallel-collecting scholars of 1 Henry VI disagree more often than not on the authorship of each scene. But this study has already shown how the obvious flaws in Gaw’s authorship hypothesis led subsequent critics to ignore completely his insightful analysis of the play’s structure: we should not be too quick in dismissing Dover Wilson’s commentary in toto. Dover Wilson was the first to argue convincingly that Nashe wrote the first act of the play; an hypothesis which Taylor has since emphatically demonstrated to be the best reading of both the internal and external evidence. 97 Now Dover Wilson could not have been more open about the intuitive nature of his hypothesis for the genesis of 1 Henry VI, and yet in two major aspects of that genesis—the number of playwrights involved and the author of Act 1—his conclusions closely correspond to those drawn by this chapter and Taylor from vastly more comprehensive and objective investigations. From his subjective judgements of the verse quality across 1 Henry VI and his collection of numerous parallels, Dover Wilson concluded that Greene was present in every scene Taylor ascribes to W and Y. He believed Shakespeare revised most of those scenes, to different degrees. This chapter has found no evidence of mixed authorship in any of the scenes Taylor attributes to W and Y and has instead uncovered convergent evidence in F supporting the hypothesis that they were all written by the same playwright. Dover Wilson’s examination of the verse in 1 Henry
96
H. C. Hart (ed.),The First Part of King Henry the Sixth, 2nd rev. edn. (London: Methuen, 1930), The Arden Shakespeare. 97 Taylor notes that Archibald Slater, in Shakespeare and Tom Nashe (Stirling, 1935), anticipated Dover Wilson’s attribution ‘amidst a welter of embarrassing speculation’ (Taylor 1995, p. 177).
236
VI was of course underpinned by his personal conviction that most of it was nonShakespearean. But this chapter has already objectively verified the validity of that conviction, and from Dover Wilson’s identification of links in vocabulary, prosody, and grammar, three clear prosodic profiles emerge from the text. The versification of the scenes and parts of scenes Dover Wilson attributed to Shakespeare cannot be faulted. It should come as no surprise that the verse construction of Act 1 differs from that of the rest of the play: the number of line-fillers (‘words unnecessary to the sense but required to eke out the decasyllables’) that Dover Wilson identified in the first scene of Act 1 alone is almost twice that he found in all Taylor’s ‘W’ and Y scenes combined. 98 This telling distribution can be added to the mass of evidence isolating Act 1 already presented in this chapter. While there is certainly no great poetry in the first six scenes of 1 Henry VI, and the language is grievously contorted by an inordinate amount of grammatical inversion, in his commentary, Dover Wilson describes its verse as ‘prose’ on only one occasion, at 1.3.1, 4–5. The faults of the third profile—which Dover Wilson attributed to Greene and which he identified in Taylor’s ‘W’ and Y scenes—are reproduced below from his commentary:
2.l. 32 has ‘[p]oor, imprecise phrasing’; 35–7 is ‘[m]ore clumsy writing’. 99 2.2
98 Wilson 1952a, pp. 111–209. Wilson notes eight in his commentary for 1.1 (ll. 61 ‘quite’; 62 ‘dead’; 89 ‘bad’; 90 ‘quite’; 112 ‘full’; 114 ‘round’; 119 ‘off’; 126 ‘All the whole’) and only five in 2.1–3, 2.5, Act 3, 4.1, and Act 5 (see below). Both 1.1.40 and 1.2.132 are ‘difficult to scan’—none of the lines in Taylor’s ‘W’ and Y scenes are so described. 99 Ibid. p. 139.
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16 ‘middle centre’ is tautological; 28 ‘Am sure’ ‘[m]akes nonsense of “as far as I could…discern”’; (26); 38–43 are ‘[t]ortuous and padded’. 100 2.3 29–30 display ‘[s]tilted ineptitude’; 31 is ‘[c]lumsy’. 101 2.5 17–19 exhibit an ‘awkward’ threefold repetition of ‘will come’; 1–73 and 74–92: ‘[n]ote the striking change from a free-flowing vigorous verse to one that is barely verse’. 102
3.1 65–73 are ‘[e]mpty, trite, diffuse’; 80 is ‘[p]rosaic verse; 181 ‘[s]uperfluous after l. 78’; 96 is ‘sheer prose’; 154–5 ‘[p]rose’; 194–200 are ‘[w]retched lines, with awkward duplication of “that” and “which”’. 103 3.2 24–5 is ‘[a]wkwardly phrased’; 32 is ‘[s]lapdash’, 118 ‘Warlike and martial’ is tautological; 126–133 are repetitious. 104 3.3 57 ‘stainèd spots’ is tautological. 105 3.4 9–12 exhibit an ungrammatical change from third person to first person possessive pronoun; 11 ‘got’ is a line-filling word; 29 ‘of’ is a line-filler. 106
4.1
100
Ibid. pp. 141–2. Ibid. p. 143. 102 Ibid. p. 151. 103 Ibid. pp. 155–9. 104 Ibid. pp. 160–4. 105 Ibid. p. 167. 106 Ibid. pp. 169–70. 101
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21–2 ‘And that the French were almost ten to one, / Before we met or that a stroke was given’ has an ‘awkward’ repetition of ‘that’; 28 ‘Or whether that such cowards ought to wear’ is also ‘awkward’; 29 ‘yea or no?’ is line-filling (repeated at 5.3.80). 107
5.1 5 ‘of’ is a line-filling word (also at 3.4.29 above); 8–14 is ‘[p]rose in verse lengths; 20 ‘[p]rose’; 46 ‘argument and proof’ is tautological. 108 5.2 (21 lines) 5.3 8–9 ‘[p]rosaic verse’; 8 ‘speedy and quick’ is tautological; 91–6 ‘[c]hopped prose’; 164– 169 ‘this’ occurs five times in six lines; 168 ‘And make this marriage to be solemnised’ is ‘[a]t once awkward and diffuse’. 109 5.4 15–16 ‘[n]ote the diffuse “wicked and vile”’; 101 ‘some matter’ is [q]ueerly vague and inconsequent; 116–22 ‘prose’ and ‘slipshod bombast’; 171–2 ‘crown of England’ concluding both lines is ‘[p]uerile repetition. 110 5.5 35 ‘may be broke’ is ‘[c]onfused writing’ which makes it appear that the ‘daughter’ can be broken, not the marriage pledge. 111
Six faults are noted in both the ‘W’ and the Y scenes of Taylor’s division: (1) tautology; (2) prosaic verse; (3) ‘awkward’ phrasing; (4) occasional line-filling (the verse at 2.2.38–43 is ‘[t]ortuous and padded’ while in both 3.4 and 5.1 ‘of’ is used as a line-filler, and ‘yea or no?’ similarly pads out 4.1.29 and 5.3.80); (5) non-rhetorical repetition; (6) confusion in the sense and/or grammatical discontinuity (2.2.26–8,
107
Ibid. pp. 171–2. Ibid. pp. 191–2. Ibid. pp. 195–9 110 Ibid. pp. 201–5. 111 Ibid. p. 207. 108 109
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3.4.9–12; 5.5.35). The frequency of the different kinds of fault is more or less consistent across all of the scenes. Dover Wilson’s qualitative analysis thus harmonises with the results of the verse tests documented in section 7 above, which cannot distinguish the metrical habits of W from those of Y. When we make a more specific comparison of the ‘W’ and Y scenes, the hypothesis that they were authored by the same playwright is further reinforced.
4.10 Scenic Parallels: Evidence of Common Authorship My suspicion that the curious distribution of split verse lines in F is a distinguishing habit of one of the authors present in 1 Henry VI is confirmed by a multi-faceted parallel between a scene Taylor attributes to W and another he attributes to Y. I discussed this parallel in a different context in my analysis of the play’s structure in Chapter 2, but it is certainly worth re-examining it here. The ‘capture’ of Talbot by the Countess of Auvergne in 2.3 (W) echoes the dramaturgy, diction and prosody of the ‘capture’ of Margaret by Suffolk in 5.3 (Y):
COUNTESS If thou be he, then art thou prisoner. TALBOT Prisoner! To whom? COUNTESS
To me, bloodthirsty lord,
And for that cause I trained thee to my house. (2.3.32–4)
SUFFOLK …See, Reignier, see, thy daughter prisoner! REIGNIER To whom? SUFFOLK
To me.
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REIGNIER
Suffolk, what remedy? I am a soldier and unapt to weep… (5.3.131–33)
In addition to the dramaturgical correspondences, again as noted in Chapter 2, there is a telling duplication of phrasing and vocabulary in the immediate surrounds of the two exchanges. At 2.3.26 Talbot politely excuses himself with ‘But since your ladyship is not at leisure…’ while Margaret asks Suffolk at 5.3.97 ‘Are you not at leisure?’. The rare and distinctive ‘captivate’ appears at 2.3.41 and again at 5.3.107. 112 Recall Taylor’s refusal to accept that any more than ‘piecemeal adjustments’ had been made to the copy for F, or that the play had been substantially revised. He certainly gives no indication that 2.3 and 5.3 were in any way revised and my own analysis of the play’s structure found no evidence of mixed authorship in those scenes. It could not be more patent that the same playwright wrote both of the above ‘captures’ in 1 Henry VI. It is further testimony to Dover Wilson’s refined appreciation of the different styles in 1 Henry VI that he judged 2.1 and 5.2 (linked above by their treatment of Joan of Arc), the near neighbours of 2.3 and 5.3, to be the only scenes of the fourteen Taylor ascribes to W and Y to be completely untouched by Shakespeare and written by the same playwright (Greene). 113 As Chapter 2 established, the Tower scene (2.5) is as old as the play and is in many ways redundant with the Rose Plucking scene (2.4) in place. 114 The internal evidence suggests that 2.4 was written to replace 2.5 some time after the original
112
Ibid. p. 143. Ibid. p. xl. 114 See Chapter 2, section 6. 113
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performances of harey the vj. Richard’s expression ‘restorèd to my blood’(128) in the concluding couplet of the Tower scene is pointedly repeated in consecutive lines late in the following scene (3.1.158–9), indicating that the author of the latter scene (Y, according to Taylor) knew 2.5 (which Taylor believes was authored by W) intimately. The use of Exeter in a chorus-like role connects 3.1, 4.1, and 5.1 in a way that further counts against the existence of Taylor’s W. In each of two closing soliloquies (3.1.186–200 and 4.1.182–94) and an extended aside (5.1.28–33), Exeter predicts doom for the kingdom. At 3.1.194–8 and 5.1.30–3 he is made to quote old prophecies by the playwright (Y). Gaw considers all three speeches ‘strikingly parallel’, and that ‘they are all so similar in metre…, in style, and in tone as to stamp them as unmistakably the mintage of the same brain using the same technique to accomplish the same purpose’. 115 The presence of a rare (in 1 Henry VI) stage direction in both 3.1 and 4.1 supports Gaw’s belief in their common authorship: ‘Manet Exeter’ appears immediately before each soliloquy (TLN 1405, 1934). ‘Manet’ appears only twice elsewhere in F at TLN 1721; 3.4.27 SD, and again at TLN 1925; 4.1.173 SD. The same three scenes (3.1, 4.1, and 5.1) and another Y scene, 5.5, are the only ones to exhibit the spelling ‘Glocester’ which occurs at 3.1.49, 4.1.0 SD (entry); 5.1.0 (entry); 5.5.0 SD (entry) and 5.5.102 SD (exit). 116 Both compositors set this rare variant, and even Hattaway, who believes Shakespeare’s varied spellings and compositorial interference satisfactorily account for all of the spelling inconsistencies in F, allows that the spelling ‘Glocester’ ‘may well be authorial’. 117 The fact that the spelling occurs three times in entry stage directions, once in a ‘W’ scene and twice in
115
Gaw 1926, p. 98. For the TLN references see p. 171, n. 18 above. 117 Hattaway 1990, p. 189. Both compositors also set the other variants found in F: ‘Gloster’ and ‘Gloucester’. 116
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Y scenes, is certainly worth noting, as is the fact that the only ‘Glocester’ to appear in the main text of the play occurs in a split verse line (3.1.49; one of four between ll. 41–74). As I noted in Chapter 2, the learned and witty Master Vernon of 2.4 bears little resemblance to the flat and generic brawler who speaks under the same name in 3.4 and 4.1. Taylor, by attributing 4.1 to W, would have it that three different playwrights authored the thirty-eight lines Vernon speaks in 1 Henry VI. This scenario is not impossible, of course, but nor is it the most likely. I reproduce below short, ten-line excerpts from the latter two scenes, italicising lexical correspondences between them:
VERNON Now, sir, to you that were so hot at sea Disgracing of these colours that I wear In honour of my noble Lord of York, Dar’st thou maintain the former words thou spak’st? BASSET Yes, sir, as well as you dare patronage The envious barking of your saucy tongue Against my lord the Duke of Somerset. VERNON Sirrah, thy lord I honour as he is. BASSET Why, what is he? As good a man as York! VERNON Hark, ye, not so: in witness, take ye that. BASSET Villain, thou know’st the law of arms is such… (3.4.28–38)
BASSET Crossing the sea from England to France, This fellow here with envious carping tongue Upbraided me about the rose I wear, Saying the sanguine colour of the leaves Did represent my master’s blushing cheeks
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When stubbornly he did repugn the truth About a certain question in the law Argued betwixt the Duke of York and him; With other vile and ignominious terms: In confutation of which rude reproach, And in defence of my lord’s worthiness, I crave the benefit of law of arms. (4.1.89–100)
The parallels in diction and phrasing support the hypothesis that the quarrels between Vernon and Basset in 3.4 and 4.1 were written by the same playwright. Note especially the telling uses of ‘envious’ and ‘tongue’ in close proximity, and the common concern with the ‘law of arms’. When we combine these links with those presented in the previous sections we can see that in many ways—dramaturgical, metrical, linguistic, and stylistic—the scenes Taylor ascribes to W are indistinguishable from those he ascribes to Y. The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that a single playwright authored 2.1–3, 2.5, Act 3, 4.1, and Act 5. By this stage of my investigation, we can be certain that Author Z wrote all of Act 1 and nothing else, and that the Rose Plucking scene (2.4) is certainly by Shakespeare. This leaves only the Bordeaux sequence (4.2–7), the part of 1 Henry VI which Taylor and I agree contains the work of more than one playwright; we disagree however, on the extent to which it exhibits mixed authorship.
4.11 Four Talbots and Two Lucys: Two Hands in the Bordeaux Sequence
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Taylor’s methodology, while not without its shortcomings, is easily the most objective that has so far been applied to the problem of the genesis of 1 Henry VI. His hypothesis for Shakespeare’s authorial share reinforces the far more subjective hypotheses of his most noteworthy predecessors—Fleay, Gaw, Dover Wilson, and Mincoff—who are all in agreement that 2.4 and 4.2–7 are more Shakespearean than the rest of the play. As Chapter 2 established however, the Bordeaux sequence (4.2–7) exhibits considerable and convergent evidence of substantial revision. Taylor’s own final division of shares cited above insists on there being more than one authorial hand present in 4.2–7. After the Rose Plucking scene (2.4), the first scene of the Bordeaux sequence (4.2) is generally considered the most characteristically Shakespearean in 1 Henry VI. Mincoff’s analysis of the first Bordeaux scene in The First Steps is the most astute available. 118 In his earlier pronouncement, ‘The Composition of Henry VI, Part I’, he distils the Shakespearean essence of the scene just as cogently:
[4.2 is] very clearly Shakespearian…Here—and practically speaking only here—we find such contrasting pairs of epithets as “stately and air-braving towers” (l. 13, air-braving is in itself typical); “thou ominous and fearful owl of death”(l. 15); “negligent and heedless discipline” (l. 44); such knotty expressions as “wall thee from the liberty of flight”(l. 24), “ere the glass that now begins to run Finish the process of his sandy hour” (ll. 35–6), and a long-drawn metaphor of deer and hounds growing by association out of the initial metaphor “How are we park’d and bounded in a pale” (l. 45). This would seem to be
118
See section 10 of Chapter 2.
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comparatively ripe Shakespeare, considerably later than the scene just discussed [5.3], and belongs in all probability to a later revision. 119
The frequency of poetically charged ‘knotty expressions’ in 4.2 is unequalled by any other scene in 1 Henry VI. The scenes that come closest are 4.3 and 4.4; they exhibit the following personifications, in which Mincoff emphasises the Shakespearean ‘pregnant adjective’:
‘Who now is girdled with a waist of iron And hemm’d about with grim destruction.
(IV. iii. 20 f.)
Sleeping neglection doth betray to loss The conquest of our scarce cold conqueror.
Ring’d about with bold diversity.
(IV. iii. 49 f.)
(IV. iv. 14)
To beat assailing death from his weak legions. (IV. iv. 16)’ 120
Nevertheless, Mincoff detects two compositional layers in 4.2–7, and considers that parts of Shakespeare’s ‘earlier version’ of the Bordeaux sequence—‘IV.iii.1–16 in particular’—may well have been preserved when he rewrote 4.2–7 for ‘a revival of the play sometime about 1594’. 121 Mincoff did not elaborate on why he singled out the first sixteen lines of 4.3 as having been written earlier than the rest of the scene, which exhibits two
119
Mincoff, 1965, p. 281. Ibid. p. 282. 121 Ibid. pp. 283, 287. 120
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personifications typical of ‘comparatively ripe Shakespeare’. Nor does he register the patent confusion caused by the appearances of Sir William Lucy in 4.3–4 and 4.7, which I fully documented in section 11 of Chapter 2. Is it purely coincidental that Lucy, whose name marks him as a peculiarly Shakespearean character, speaks for the first time in modern editions at 4.3.17? In F he is not identified until TLN 2053; 4.3.43, when, rather confusingly for the audience, York utters the surprisingly familiar ‘Lucie, farewell’. With Gaw, Dover Wilson believes that Lucy’s speeches in 4.3 ‘are a blend of two distinct styles’. 122 My own doubts over the uniformity of 4.3 are in a small way objectified by the presence of no less than three obsolete syllabic -ed verb inflections in seven lines of the ‘earlier version’ of the scene (ll. 6, 10, and 12), when only one appears in 2.4 (133 lines) and 4.2 (56 lines) respectively, the scenes considered to be the most Shakespearean of the play. The most conspicuous lacuna in Taylor’s discussion of the Bordeaux sequence in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ is his failure to register the very problematic co-existence of 4.5 and 4.6 in F. Following the sound and persuasive arguments of Dover Wilson and Pearlman presented in Chapter 2, I believe 4.5 was written by Shakespeare to replace 4.6—that is, the latter scene was printed by mistake. I also believe that my comparison of the Icarus allusions in 4.6 and 4.7 in subsection 6.2 above considerably reinforces Dover Wilson’s hypothesis that 4.6 was not authored by Shakespeare. A close examination of the internal evidence in this passage of 1 Henry VI yields further clues to the authorship of the last three scenes of the Bordeaux sequence. As Chapter 2 demonstrated, 4.7 is in many ways the most problematic scene in 1 Henry VI. Apart from the remarks cited in section 11 of Chapter 2 above, Taylor
122
Wilson 1952a, p. 178; Gaw 1926, p. 134.
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conspicuously avoids discussion of 4.7.33–96, which is in fact longer than any other scene of the Bordeaux sequence. This seems odd given that 4.7 exhibits more bibliographical, metrical, and stylistic discontinuities than any other scene in 1 Henry VI. Taylor attributes only the first thirty-two lines of 4.7 to Shakespeare on the basis of little more than the ‘O/Oh’ distribution in F and the fact that Talbot breathes his last at 4.7.32. But the action stays in Bordeaux for another sixty-four lines, after which Scena secunda appears in F and the action switches to London, where the first scene of the traditional Act 5 is set. ‘Cautious heads,’ Taylor observes, ‘will not be too dogmatic about the authorship of IV.vii.33–96, which might well contain the work of two different writers’. 123 Why does Taylor include this teasing speculation, which he conspicuously fails to justify, in his cursory and dismissive discussion of ‘theories of substantial revision’ in ‘Shakespeare and Others’? It comes at the end of a paragraph in which he silently modifies the position he had adopted in Textual Companion, that allowed for ‘revision or the loss of a scene’ as a possible cause of the confusion in F over where Act 4 ends and Act 5 begins. 124 How likely is it that the ninety-six lines of 4.7 should contain the writing of up to three playwrights, without substantial revision having played a part in the scene’s construction? In twenty-six out of 1 Henry VI’s twenty-seven scenes (in the traditional division) ‘Shakespeare and Others’ finds no trace of mixed authorship. In the case of 4.7, however, Taylor casually implies that up to three playwrights could be present, none of whom was working in the capacity of a reviser. Again, this is not an impossible reconstruction, but it is simply incompatible with the following internal
123 124
Taylor 1995, p. 171. TC, p. 218.
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evidence which Taylor, apparently in an effort to give the issue of revision as short a shrift as possible, passes over in ‘Shakespeare and Others’. One should begin a search for the author(s) of 4.7.33–96 by determining whether or not the playwrights already identified in F are present in the passage. There are three ‘O’s in 4.7.1–32 and three ‘Oh’s in the remainder of the scene. This distribution points away from Author Z’s involvement in 4.7.33–96—seven ‘O’s and not one ‘Oh’ appear in Act 1—and thus agrees with the mass of evidence marshalled in this chapter that indicates the author of Act 1 wrote nothing else in 1 Henry VI. The preference for ‘Oh’ in ll. 33–96 does however match that of Y. What other indicators suggest Y could have authored 4.7.33–96? Before I look more closely at these sixtyfour lines, I would like to take a small step back, as it were, and go over my conclusions concerning the authorship of the surrounding scenes. Y not only wrote all of Act 3 and all of Act 5, he has also been shown to have authored 2.1–3, 2.5 and 4.1. If (1) Z wrote Act 1 and only Act 1, and (2) Shakespeare, according to Taylor, wrote 4.2–7.32, how likely is it that a hitherto completely undetected playwright wrote just sixty-four lines of 4.7 in 1 Henry VI? From the big picture then, Y emerges as by far the strongest candidate for the authorship of 4.7.33–96; let us now refocus on the lines themselves. When Joan of Arc enters with the French immediately after Talbot dies at 4.7.32, the stage direction in F refers to her as ‘Pucell’ (TLN 2265), and her speeches in the scene are twice prefixed ‘Puc.’ (at TLN 2270 and 2306) and once ‘Pucel.’ (TLN 2321). Y used all of these spellings elsewhere in his work on the play; Z used the ‘Puz-’ stem exclusively. I have already pointed out that nowhere in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ does Taylor acknowledge that Sir William Lucy, whose presence in the play can only be explained by Shakespeare wanting to honour a Stratford worthy, 249
nevertheless speaks twenty-six lines of the non-Shakespearean 4.7.33–96. In Chapter 2 I discussed Pearlman’s hypothesis that Shakespeare incompletely conflated two very minor characters, a messenger and a herald, into the role of Lucy. I provisionally concluded there that Shakespeare thoroughly but incompletely revised the entire Bordeaux sequence, which was originally written by another playwright. If, as Taylor thinks, Shakespeare only wrote the first thirty-two lines of 4.7, and, as Pearlman thinks, Lucy’s lines in the remainder of the scene were originally intended for the herald mentioned at TLN 2285; 4.7.50 SD, this would explain why the Lucy of 4.7 has no inkling of the battle’s outcome, when the Lucy of 4.3 and 4.4 had repeatedly stressed that the Talbots were hopelessly outnumbered by the French. The Lucy of the earlier scenes is in no doubt at all about Talbot’s fate:
The fraud of England, not the force of France, Hath now entrapped the noble-minded Talbot: Never to England shall he bear his life, But dies betrayed to fortune by your strife. (4.4.36–9)
Presumably the original herald had not appeared on stage before his entry at 4.7.50 SD; he clearly has a different expectation of the battle’s outcome from that of the Lucy of 4.3 and 4.4. The hypothesis that it was Y who authored 4.7.33–96 is strengthened by Lucy’s speech after he finally notices the Talbots’ corpses, in which he exclaims:
O that I could but call these dead to life, It were enough to fright the realm of France!
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Were but his picture left amongst you here It would amaze the proudest of you all. (4.7.81–4)
Here Shakespeare’s Lucy, with his non-Shakespearean words (according to Taylor), echoes those of the Countess of Auvergne in Y’s 2.3, where she elaborately compares Talbot’s shadow with his substance:
Long time thy shadow hath been thrall to me, For in my gallery thy picture hangs; But now the substance shall endure the like, (2.3.35–7)
The link is subtle, but it is deliberate. Earlier in 2.3 the Countess refers to her eyes in a figure constructed along the same lines as that used by Lucy just before he mentions Talbot’s ‘picture’ in 4.7. First the Countess:
Fain would mine eyes be witness with my ears To give their censure of these rare reports. (2.3.9–10) O were mine eye-balls into bullets turned, That I in rage might shoot them at your faces! (4.7.79–80)
Another inter-scene parallel is established by Joan saying of Lucy/the herald at 4.7.87: ‘I think this upstart is old Talbot’s ghost’, and the Dauphin uttering soon after, in a Y scene: ‘I trust the ghost of Talbot is not there’ (5.2.16). 251
A close examination of 4.5 and 4.6 yields further evidence of Y’s authorship of 4.7.33–96. My analysis of the two Icarus allusions in subsection 6.2 above revealed that they were composed by two different dramatic imaginations, and reinforced the arguments of Dover Wilson and Pearlman that 4.6 was printed by mistake. Chambers casually dismissed both Icarus allusions as ‘tasteless’, but my comparison showed that his adjective only applies to the allusion in 4.6. 125 Shakespeare completely rewrote 4.6, and transformed its inept invocation of Daedalus and Icarus into the sophisticated updating of the Greek myth Talbot speaks at the beginning of 4.7. Taylor, who insists Shakespeare wrote both 4.5 and 4.6, does not offer an explanation for why Shakespeare, after skilfully employing stichomythia in the first scene in which the two Talbots defy each other’s pleas to flee, goes on to completely abandon the rhetorical device—and his ability to write unforced rhymed couplets—in the second, in which the two Talbots likewise urge each other to flee. Act 4, scene 6 contains one ‘Oh’ (TLN 2203)—the only one found in 4.2–6, which exhibit seven ‘O’s. Talbot calls his son the ‘pride of Gallia’ at 4.6.15, and the Bastard of Orléans calls Talbot ‘Gallia’s wonder’ at 4.7.48. A Literature Online search reveals that Shakespeare used ‘Gallia’ in 3 Henry VI, Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline, but never in a genitive construction with an abstract noun. At 4.7.38 Joan relates to the French leaders what she said to young Talbot when they met in battle: ‘Thou maiden youth, be vanquished by a maid’, which clearly echoes 4.6.16–8:
The ireful Bastard Orléans, that drew blood
125
Chambers 1930, i, 291.
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From thee, my boy, and had the maidenhood Of thy first fight, I soon encounterèd…
This peculiarity, in which a young male soldier loses his ‘maidenhood’ in his first fight, is without parallel in the Shakespeare canon. It would seem that the author of 4.6 saw dramatic potential in mirroring Joan’s virginity in young Talbot’s martial virginity. The author of 4.7.33–96 also made the connection—even if he did not make it clear whether Joan is referring to young John’s martial virginity or to his being literally a ‘male maiden’. Certainly the very unusual juxtaposition of a débutante male soldier with maidenhood is common to both scenes. Let us summarise the authorship of the Bordeaux sequence, moving backwards from 4.7. Taylor’s belief that Shakespeare wrote the first thirty-two lines of 4.7 has been greatly reinforced by my discussion in subsection 6.2 above, centred around the allusion to Icarus found therein. There are no indications in 4.7.33–96 of divided authorship—Taylor’s throwaway speculation finds no support in F. There are, however, strong indicators in the text that those lines were authored by Y. Shakespeare did not write 4.6, and there is no indication at all in F that Z, the author of Act 1, wrote anything else in 1 Henry VI. Y, apart from being the most obvious candidate, deliberately linked Joan and the young Talbot with maidenhood 4.7.38, and the same conceit is employed at 4.6.16–8. Taylor and I agree that Shakespeare wrote 4.5. In The Road to Stratford, Frank O’Connor notes Shakespeare’s fondness, especially in his early plays, for what he dubs ‘the reflexive conceit’. The only example of this figure in 1 Henry VI occurs at 4.5.48–9:
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No more can I be severed from your side Than can yourself yourself in twain divide.
Dover Wilson was unable to find this construction in the plays of Shakespeare’s early contemporaries. 126 The profound confusion over the appearances of Lucy in 4.3. and 4.4, which I anatomised in Chapter 2, together with the inconsistencies generated by his appearance in 4.7, are best explained by the hypothesis that Shakespeare incompletely conflated two very minor roles—a messenger and a herald—and renamed the composite character after a Stratford worthy, Sir William Lucy. This hypothesis explains why the ‘Shakespearean’ Lucy who appears at 4.7.50 and who speaks twenty-six non-Shakespearean lines appears to have suffered an attack of amnesia since his appearances in 4.3 and 4.4: his lines in 4.7 were originally intended for a herald and, as I have argued, were written by Y. The first Bordeaux scene, 4.2, is quintessentially Shakespearean.
4.12 Conclusion My critique of Taylor’s authorship model for 1 Henry VI has considerably amplified and reinforced his evidence for the presence of three playwrights in the text. I have, however, established that there is no significant internal evidence for the existence of Taylor’s Author W, and that there is in fact considerable convergent evidence in F for Y’s authorship of all the scenes he ascribes to his fourth playwright. Occam’s razor can therefore legitimately be stropped and applied to Taylor’s division of shares. This and the preceding chapters have demonstrated that the only parts of F that exhibit
126
Frank O’Connor, The Road to Stratford (London: Methuen, 1948), pp. 26–9; Wilson 1952a, p. xlvi.
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evidence of substantial revision are the same scenes Taylor believes are Shakespearean—2.4 and 4.2–7. The best hypothesis for the authorship of the Bordeaux sequence (4.2–7) is that F preserves Shakespeare’s extensive but incomplete revision of scenes originally written by Y for Henslowe’s harey the vj. That play is seen to have been a collaboration between Z, who wrote Act 1, and Y, who wrote Acts 2–5. It seems Shakespeare was primarily concerned to breathe new life into the York/Somerset plot element of harey the vj. All of his work in 1 Henry VI, not just his insertion of the Rose Plucking scene (2.4), improves harey the vj’s dramatisation of the origin of the Wars of the Roses. Exactly when Shakespeare revised harey the vj we will never know. The next chapter presents new evidence that further refines our understanding of ‘who wrote what and when’ in 1 Henry VI. I am ready, however, to present, on the following page, my own division of shares for Henslowe’s harey the vj, by Y and Z, later revised by Shakespeare into 1 Henry VI:
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Table 12: Authorial division of 1 Henry VI: Shakespeare’s revision of Henslowe’s harey the vj, a collaborative play by Y and Z
Act 1
Z
2.1–3
Y
2.4
Shakespeare
2.5, Act 3, 4.1
Y
4.2
Shakespeare
4.3–4
Shakespeare incompletely revising Y’s original
4.5
Shakespeare
4.6
Y
4.7.1–32
Shakespeare
4.7.33–end
Y
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5 SHAKESPEARE, NASHE, AND ONE OTHER
Gary Taylor begins section IV of ‘Shakespeare and Others’ with the following remarks:
Significant qualities of nonsense have been generated by scholars intent on assigning names to Shakespeare’s collaborators in Part One; moreover, the nonsense has not even had the tact to be consistent, for nobody seems to agree with anybody else. Absolutists occasionally point to this disarray as an indictment on the whole exercise. But for a play of this period we might well be able to identify the presence of a number of different collaborators, without knowing their names. Moreover, the investigation of authorship is like other kinds of scholarship, progressive. Critical opinions may or may not become obsolete; scholarly judgments do. 1
This study has already furnished abundant proof of the accuracy of Taylor’s first sentence. The contemporary critics who insist on Shakespeare’s sole authorship of the play have without doubt been given plenty of ammunition by the centuries of ‘disarray’ alluded to above. But when that ammunition is aimed at Taylor’s argument for the multiple authorship of 1 Henry VI, the ‘absolutists’ can easily be demonstrated to be firing blanks. No comprehensive analysis and/or convincing refutation of all of Taylor’s evidence has been published. In the context of the tumultuous critical heritage of 1 Henry VI, the fact that Taylor’s hypothesis has survived unchallenged
1
Taylor 1995, pp. 172–3.
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for ten years is highly significant. As Taylor rightly observes, and as the previous chapter has shown, ‘the investigation of authorship is, like other kinds of scholarship, progressive’. 2 Making progress in the case of 1 Henry VI has been exceptionally difficult, and while we can now be certain that the play was not written solely by Shakespeare, we cannot, as the foregoing chapters have made clear, be at all certain about when the play became Shakespearean. Our inability to exactly fix the date of Shakespeare’s work on the play, coupled with the pervasive evidence of substantial revision in and around the scenes attributed to him in the division of shares at the end of the previous chapter, invalidates Taylor’s phrase ‘Shakespeare’s collaborators’. It was only Authors Y and Z, I have argued, who collaborated on Henslowe’s harey the vj; Shakespeare worked on the play merely as a reviser, some time after the original performances of the play in 1592–3. Taylor begins the process of identifying the other authors present in 1 Henry VI by summarising our knowledge of who was writing for the stage around the time harey the vj was first performed:
We know the names of only twelve playwrights writing for the public theaters in the period between 1580 and 1595: Henry Chettle, Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, Anthony Munday, Thomas Nashe, George Peele, Henry Porter, William Shakespeare, Robert Wilson, and Robert Yarrington (who may be only a scribe). If we can accept that Part One was written between late 1591 and early 1592, we can eliminate both Chettle and Lodge from this list of potential candidates. Lodge left England on 26 August 1591, not returning until 11 June 1593; Chettle knew nothing of
2
Ibid. p. 172.
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Shakespeare, personally or as a writer, until late 1592. Of the remaining ten names, one can be clearly identified in the play (Shakespeare). Consequently, if we assign names to Shakespeare’s apparent collaborators, three of the remaining nine known playwrights must be present in the play. But twenty-one of the sixty-one extant public theater plays written between 1580 and 1595 remain anonymous; for all we know, each might have been written by a different author. Certainly, for purposes of identification we must initially assume that each anonymous play has a different author. This assumption leaves us with thirty available candidates, of which only nine can be named. 3
Initially then, the odds do not look promising, especially when the canons of the named candidates are much smaller and less fixed than Shakespeare’s. But in Chapter 4 I was able to assemble a comprehensive profile of the authorial habits of Z, the author of Act 1, and to consolidate considerably Taylor’s conclusion that the first six scenes of the play are linguistically and stylistically exceptional. The establishing of this multi-faceted profile significantly shortens the odds against the accurate identification of Author Z.
5.1 Casting for ‘Z’, the Author of Act 1 Taylor demonstrates how rare Z’s habit for using ‘here’ in stage directions was: of all the extant plays written between 1580 and 1595, only Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592) by Thomas Nashe can be said to exhibit a similar proportion of the
3
Ibid. pp. 173–4; 202, ns. 48 and 49. Taylor is too quick to discount Chettle’s possible connection with Henslowe’s harey the vj. We saw in my Introduction that he may very well have authored ‘Greene’s’ letter to the playwrights in the Groatsworth, which reveals an intimate familiarity with Shakespeare’s early theatrical career. In the circumstances, Chettle’s claim in the preface of his Kind-Heart’s Dream—that he did not know Shakespeare in September 1592 (when he entered the Groatsworth in the Stationers’ Register)—should be taken with a pinch, if not a handful, of salt.
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same kind of directions. 4 Dover Wilson, who championed Nashe as the author of Act 1 in his 1952 Cambridge edition of the play, detected an array of correspondences in the vocabulary and, more tellingly, the peculiar sources used by the author of Act 1 with the works of Nashe, and established that ‘here’ occurs nine times in the stage directions of Summer’s Last Will. 5 While Taylor is right to say that ‘Wilson’s attribution to Nashe has been seriously challenged only once, by C. B. Harlow’, there had been little endorsement of Dover Wilson’s attribution before Taylor’s article. 6 Taylor efficiently overrules Harlow’s objections, a close reading of which reveals the indisputable accuracy of Taylor’s assessment that ‘Harlow’s tactics of attrition usefully limit and define the reliability of some of Wilson’s verbal parallels, without in any way denying or contradicting the bulk of his case’. 7 Harlow’s indignation at Dover Wilson’s denying of Act 1 to Shakespeare is testimony to the astonishing impact Alexander had on the world of Shakespearean criticism; less than forty years before Harlow’s impassioned defence, the vast majority of critics were just as indignant at the suggestion Shakespeare did write Act 1. By 1965, that Shakespeare was the sole author of 1 Henry VI had become a sacred truth; before Alexander it had been considered virtually heretical to say so. Matters of faith are always above and beyond reasoned argument, and Taylor encapsulates perfectly Harlow’s privileging of blind faith over textual evidence:
4
Ibid. p. 174. Wilson 1952a, p. 105. Taylor 1995, pp. 174, 202, n. 51. 7 Ibid. p. 175. 5 6
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The absurdity of this argument against Nashe is apparent if we compare it with Harlow’s argument in favor of Shakespeare: Shakespeare wrote act 1 (because he echoed [A Denfensative against the Poison of Supposed Prophecies (1583), by Henry Howard] ten to fifteen years later) but Nashe could not have written act 1 (because most of his many echoes of Howard were allegedly written a few months after Part One). 8
One wonders how Harlow would have responded to Taylor’s ‘Shakespeare and Others’. The only other critic who has attempted to discount Dover Wilson’s attribution of Act 1 to Nashe is J. J. M. Tobin, who, unlike Harlow, did have the opportunity to read Taylor’s emphatic reinforcement of Dover Wilson’s case. Incredibly, Tobin did not find his faith in Shakespeare’s authorship of Act 1 tested in the slightest by Taylor’s evidence. In his 2001 essay ‘A Touch of Greene, Much Nashe, and All Shakespeare’, Tobin recycles his previous work on what he calls ‘Shakespeare’s habitual incorporating of Nashe’s prose into his own expressions, whether of prose or verse’. 9 He was by no means the first to notice verbal parallels between the works of Nashe and Shakespeare, but he has been the most zealous in the attempt to quantify and qualify them. Tobin’s incessant privileging of Nashe’s verbal inventiveness over Shakespeare’s seems almost perverse when one considers the relative artistic achievements of the two, but, as we shall see, perversity is inherent to the logic of Tobin’s criticism. In the first section of his essay Tobin explores new territory (for him) and accepts the validity of Dover Wilson’s conclusion—based entirely on subjective parallel collecting and perceived similarities in style and thought—that
8 9
Ibid. p. 176. Tobin 2001, p. 42.
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Greene wrote the last three scenes of 1 Henry VI, scenes which Shakespeare (according to Dover Wilson) later incompletely revised. In what can only be an attempt to reinforce Dover Wilson’s conclusion, Tobin cites the Oxford Textual Companion, in which Taylor makes the unsupported claim that parts of 1 Henry VI (including the last three scenes) show strong similarities to the dramatic writings of Greene and Peele. 10 Tobin makes no mention of the nature of the evidence adduced by Dover Wilson; instead he devotes the next two pages to a contrived comparison of 1 Henry VI (which he considers to be Shakespeare’s earliest work) and, of all plays, The Tempest, which concludes with the following speculative reconstruction:
Now, the tone of the remarks of Margaret differs from that of Miranda, and the duplicity of Suffolk contrasts with the innocence of Ferdinand, but the circumstances of love and status as well as diction are analogous in the first case and often identical in the second. Shakespeare may indeed have in an autoplagiaristic manner returned to his earlier work—1 Henry VI—with the lovers and a Neapolitan king, or he many [sic] have surrendered his resistance to using Greene, held to since the time of the attack in A Groatsworth of Wit, until the composition of The Winter’s Tale, with its dependence upon Pandosto, and continued the relaxation in the writing of The Tempest by returning to the Greene-written section, Act V of 1 Henry VI, perhaps even Greene-written originally but revised by Shakespeare himself. 11
There is less of a combining intelligence at work here than a combining imagination. Tobin’s conclusion that Taylor, by presenting Nashean parallels in his argument for Nashe’s authorship of Act 1, argued like ‘a conscious user of incorrectly interpreted
10 11
Ibid. p. 39; TC, p. 217. Tobin 2001, pp. 40–1.
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evidence: “And this may help to thicken other proofs / That do demonstrate thinly”’, is not only unsupported—it is unsupportable. 12 It is Tobin himself who is thickening the clear soup of fact with the cream of speculation; his arguments above are utterly bereft of ‘proofs’ of any kind, and one has to ask just why he is so open to the hypothesis that Greene wrote the end of 1 Henry VI—for which he cites and requires not the slightest scrap of evidence—and so dismissive of the hypothesis that Nashe wrote the first act. Why does Tobin completely exclude from his essay the ‘several different arguments’ made by Taylor and unspecified ‘others’ and, more importantly, Taylor’s extremely convergent evidence in ‘Shakespeare and Others’? One does not have to look far for the answer. Tobin is a twenty-first century parallel collector who seems unaware of the existence of modern attributional techniques involving the impartial weighing of the bibliographical, linguistic, and metrical evidence of a text. By the end of his essay he believes himself to have refuted Taylor’s attribution of part of 1 Henry VI to Nashe without engaging at all with the evidence presented in ‘Shakespeare and Others’. And this after accepting the plausibility of Greene’s authorship of another part of the play on the bases that Dover Wilson had insisted upon it and that Taylor had made a passing observation in Textual Companion (but not in ‘Shakespeare and Others’) that parts of the play strongly resembled the plays of Greene and Peele! It is truly alarming that the sort of thinly-veiled logic-chopping which we encounter in Tobin’s essay should find a place in the most recent collection of scholarly essays dedicated to the Henry VI plays. Here is what Tobin was so determined not to admit into his essay: Taylor’s extensive evidence for Nashe’s
12
Ibid. p. 55.
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authorship of Act 1 of 1 Henry VI:
Like Nashe, the author of act 1 borrows from Agrippa (Shakespeare doesn’t), alludes to Froissart (Shakespeare doesn’t), had by 1592 read Howard’s Defensative (Shakespeare hadn’t) , and often used “here” in stage directions (Shakespeare didn’t). Nashe’s only extant play, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, which like Part One probably dates from 1592, also displays the same linguistic preferences in act 1 of Part One: it prefers “O” (twenty-three to one “Oh”), “amongst” (three; zero “among”), and “betwixt” (three; two “between”), while making exceptionally frequent use of “ne’er” (eleven times) and entirely avoiding “ye.” Summer’s Last Will uses syllabic -ed more frequently than any play in the Shakespeare canon, except Part One (thirty-six examples in 978 verse lines or circa 8,683 verse words: one -ed for every 241 words). Nashe also, like the author of act 1 of Part One, makes exceptionally frequent use of the obsolete -eth inflexion: fortyseven examples in verse (one -eth for every 259 words). The linguistic profile of act 1 fits Nashe as perfectly as it consistently departs from the preferences of Shakespeare and the preferences evident in the rest of Part One. Nashe also had a vocabulary range and a capacity for verbal invention equalled only by Shakespeare in this period. Nashe also makes the earliest known reference to Part One. Moreover as Wilson showed, Nashe echoed phrases from act 1 in works of his own written in 1592. 13
It seems incredible that Tobin should undertake a rebuttal of Taylor’s attribution without once directly citing the article in which that attribution was made, but that is exactly what he does in ‘A Touch of Greene, Much Nashe, and All Shakespeare’. Only when it is made clear exactly what Tobin deliberately left out of his article can the thoroughly unprofessional nature of his criticism be fully realised. The previous chapter consolidated Taylor’s conclusion in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ that
13
Taylor 1995, pp. 176–7; 203, ns. 55–6.
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Shakespeare did not write Act 1 of 1 Henry VI and Taylor’s evidence for Nashe’s authorship is as convergent as it is compelling (to anyone prepared to assimilate it and not wilfully ignore it). Of all the known playwrights writing at the time of the play’s composition, Nashe is by far the strongest candidate. No critic—and certainly not Tobin—has seriously engaged with all of Taylor’s evidence for Nashe’s authorship of Act 1 in the ten years since the publication of ‘Shakespeare and Others’. This critical silence speaks volumes. So does the endorsement of Taylor’s attribution by Edward Burns in the Arden3 1 Henry VI. 14 Unfortunately, while criticism as superficial and deliberately suppressive as Tobin’s continues to be considered scholarly, the genesis of the play will continue to be obscured by the very people who are trusted with its elucidation. The following sections present new evidence which will make it even harder for critics like Tobin to simply ignore with impunity the arguments of Dover Wilson, Taylor, and me that Shakespeare did not write Act 1, and that no known playwright other than Nashe could have written it.
5.2 The Grammatical Inversion of ‘Z’ and Nashe In subsection 6.4 of the previous chapter I presented a complete analysis of the subject/verb and direct object/verb grammatical inversion in 1 Henry VI. The results revealed that the number of inversions in first scene of the play alone (thirty), is just six less than the combined total for Acts 2–5. On average, the author of Act 1 employed one of the targeted kinds of inversions once every 8 lines. Shakespeare’s average in 2.4, 4.2–5 and 4.7.1–32 is one inversion every 29 lines, with five of the
14
Burns 2000, pp. 73–84.
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thirteen instances appearing in rhymed couplets. The parts of the play written by Y (2.1–3, 2.5, 4.1, 4.6, 4.7.33–96, and Act 5) average one inversion every 71 lines. Z therefore inverted the word order of his sentences three times as often as Shakespeare, whose high rate was certainly influenced by nearly a third of his work on the play being cast in rhymed couplets, and, remarkably, nearly nine times as often as Y. The frequency of grammatical inversion is clearly a powerful distinguishing variable for the authors of 1 Henry VI, and, with the authorial habits of Nashe already established to be extremely close to those of Author Z, I decided to analyse the grammatical inversion in the verse of Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament, using exactly the same parameters as documented in the previous chapter. The text used was McKerrow’s, which runs to 1955 lines, only 978 of which are written in verse. Summer’s Last Will nevertheless contains nearly twice as much dramatic verse as Act 1 of 1 Henry VI, and I list the targeted kinds of grammatical inversion found within its verse lines below. To make the results easier to read, Summer’s Last Will has been divided into four 500 line sections (according to McKerrow’s lineation):
Lines 1–500
[s/v] ‘droope men and beasts therefore’(105); [o/v] ‘So fayre a summer looke for neuer more’ (106); [o/v] ‘On Autumne now and Winter must I leane’(126); [s/v] ‘Needs must he fall’(127); [s/v] ‘And dyde I had in deed’(132); [o/v] ‘For her doth Summer liue’(137); [o/v] ‘that is for others made’(145); [s/v] ‘Meane I to make’(149); [s/v] ‘Then bloomes eche thing’(161); [o/v] ‘these tunes our eares doe greete’(171); [o/v] ‘in the paths of knowledge many stray’(334); [o/v] ‘To whose good husbandry we haue referr’d’(363); [o/v] ‘men in honour plac’d’(374); [o/v] ‘nor ought more did I aske’(406); [o/v] ‘Such use these times haue got’(411); [o/v] ‘Nought but good deedes hence shall we beare away’(418); [s/v] ‘lookes he ne’re so big’(446); [o/v] ‘How base is pride from
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his owne dunghill put!’(449); [o/v] ‘Some seruice or some profit I expect’(460); [o/v] ‘Greene Iuy-bushes…/He withers’(486); [s/v] ‘Then doubled is the swelling of his lookes’(493). Total: 21
Lines 501–1000 [o/v] ‘Ill vsury my fauours reape from thee’(501); [o/v] ‘The name of Martyrdome offence hath gaynd’(505); [o/v] ‘Muche Ile not say’(507); [o/v] ‘much speech much folly shewes’(507); [o/v] ‘Wherewith long labours I doe weary out’(526); [o/v] ‘teares/That by the gods were to Electrum turnd’(531–2); [o/v] ‘Knowledge owne children knowledge most despise’(540); [o/v] ‘When some men wetshod (with his waters) droupt’(553); [o/v] ‘by them impoysoned’(555); [o/v] ‘the daies by them so gouerned,/The Dog-daies hight’(651–2); [o/v] ‘infectious fosterers/Of meteors from carrion that arise’(651–2); [o/v] ‘That dogs of all come neerest, thus I prove’(671); [o/v] ‘They know what is for their owne diet best’(685); [s/v] ‘Nor liue they on’(689); [o/v] ‘That Dogges Phisicians are, thus I inferre’(721); [o/v] ‘This policie they vse’(726); [o/v] ‘Whereby what cloyes their stomacks they cast vp’(737); [o/v] ‘a lame right hand I had’(762). Total: 18
Lines 1001–1500 [o/v] ‘Thy lungs with surfeting be putrified’(1082); [o/v] ‘worse seruants no man hath’(1143); [o/v] ‘No where fidelitie and labour dwels’(1149); [o/v] ‘Hope yong heads count to build on had I wist’(1150); [o/v] ‘Conscience but few respect’(1151); [o/v] ‘If…he no knowledge tooke’(1156); [o/v] ‘you I loue’(1162); [o/v] ‘In mountaines…Eccho is hid’(1174); [o/v] ‘A woman they imagine her to be’(1179); [o/v] ‘Of secrets more desirous are’(1184); [o/v] ‘In these times had Ecchoes first fathers liu’d’(1186); [o/v] ‘No woman, but a man, she had beene faind’(1187); [o/v] ‘Are now for vnderminings onely vsde’(1195); [s/v] ‘Seeking each other to o’rethrow his mate’(1198); [o/v] ‘Tullie by one of his owne slaues was slaine’(1211); [o/v] ‘of those faire lookes make their gainfull vse’(1218); [s/v] ‘So make ill seruants sale of their Lords
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wind’(1223); [s/v] ‘Ill growes the tree affordeth ne’re a graft’(1234); [s/v] ‘Bequeath’d it is not’(1239); [o/v] ‘all things of water should be made’(1294); [o/v] ‘The baser rabble how to cheate and steale’(1323); [o/v] ‘Had their heads fild with coosning fantasies’(1328); [o/v] ‘That heauen they called Contemplation’(1333); [o/v] ‘by their examples others moou’d’(1356); [o/v] ‘They learnings benefactors reckon vp’(1360); [o/v] ‘Rich men and magistrates…/They flatter palpably’(1364–5); [o/v] ‘Alcumists also we haue’(1372); [o/v] ‘monstrous practises/Hath loytring contemplation brought forth’(1388–9); [o/v] ‘The arte of murther Machiauel hath pend’(1397); [o/v] ‘Gluttonie Epicurus doth defend’(1401); [o/v] ‘Follie Erasmus sets a flourish on’(1411); [o/v] ‘Slouenrie Grobianus magnifieth’(1414); [o/v] ‘Sodomitrie a Cardinall commends’(1415); [o/v] ‘[Sodomitrie] Aristotle necessary deemes’(1416); [o/v] ‘those that the towre of Babel built’(1454); [o/v] ‘So much vntrueth wit neuer shadowed’(1486); [o/v] ‘Gainst her owne bowels thou Arts weapons turn’st’(1487); [o/v] ‘in error that persists’(1490); [o/v] ‘For thou gainst Autumne such exceptions tak’st’(1491); [o/v] ‘no crowne will I take’(1498). Total: 40
Lines 1501–1955 [o/v] ‘All for a fowle Back-winter he layes vp’(1506); [o/v] ‘Hard craggie wayes, and vncouth slippery paths/He frames’(1507–8); [o/v] ‘but two sonnes he hath’(1510); [o/v] ‘Euilmerodach by his father dealt’(1525); [o/v] ‘Is not for any seede or tillage fit’(1550); [o/v] ‘None from his darts can flye’(1578); [o/v] ‘cankers thou feedst’(1679); [o/v] ‘With thee or Autumne haue I nought to do’(1755); [s/v] ‘As fell the deluge’(1767); [o/v] ‘Would I with thunder presently might dye’(1771); [o/v] ‘More I wil vse’(1786); [o/v] ‘I will peepe foorth, thy kingdome to supplant’(1798); [o/v] ‘My father I will quickly freeze to death’(1799); [o/v] ‘And then sole Monarch will I sit’(1800); [o/v] ‘My crowne I haue disposde already of’(1824); [o/v] ‘Who in their masters shadowes walke secure’(1828); [o/v] ‘All my faire dayes remaining I bequeath’(1843); [o/v] ‘A charmed circle draw about her court’(1853); [s/v + o/v] ‘First droupe this vniversals aged frame/E’re any malady thy strength should tame’(1859–60); [o/v] ‘on your
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faithfulnesse/…I do firmely builde’(1864–5); [s/v] ‘discend I to the feends’(1870); [s/v] ‘Gone is our sport’(1873); [s/v] ‘fled is poore Croydens pleasure’; [o/v] ‘Close chambers we do want’(1882). Total: 25
The total number of the targeted kinds of grammatical inversion in the verse of Summer’s Last Will is 104, meaning that the average rate of occurrence across the play is one every 9.4 lines. Not only is this rate almost exactly the same as Author Z’s in Act 1 of 1 Henry VI (one every 8 lines), but both Nashe and Z used object/verb inversions five times more frequently than subject/verb inversions as well: sentence subjects and verbs are inverted in only 16.8 percent of the examples in Summer’s Last Will and in 19.7 percent of those in Act 1 of 1 Henry VI. Taylor’s demonstration in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ that ‘the linguistic profile of act 1 fits Nashe as perfectly as it consistently departs from the preferences of Shakespeare and the preferences evident in the rest of Part One’ has only been challenged by one critic, in the most superficial and unprofessional fashion. In Chapter 4 I showed how the distribution of grammatical inversion in 1 Henry VI, as well as the distribution and nature of the classical and biblical allusions in the play, considerably strengthen Taylor’s unrefuted case against Shakespeare having authored Act 1. My analysis of the grammatical inversion in Summer’s Last Will identifies yet another linguistic habit that Author Z and Nashe share: an obsessive tendency to place the direct object of their sentences before the main verb in the composition of their dramatic verse. In order to obtain an accurate idea of Shakespeare’s use of such grammatical inversion around the time harey the vj was written, I submitted Richard III to the 269
same analysis applied herein to 1 Henry VI and Summer’s Last Will. In the second edition of The Riverside Shakespeare, Richard III runs to 3,887 lines, the vast majority of which is in verse. Across the whole play, which contains more than six times as much dramatic verse as Act 1 of 1 Henry VI, there are only sixty-five examples of the targeted inversions, a total which is, astonishingly, eight fewer than that returned by the first act of 1 Henry VI. At one inversion every sixty lines, Shakespeare’s rate in Richard III is a staggering seven times lower than that of the author of the first act of 1 Henry VI and Summer’s Last Will. Of the sixty-five examples in Richard III, twenty—or roughly 30 percent—are subject/verb inversions, which is considerably higher than the equivalent percentage returned by both Act 1 of 1 Henry VI and Summer’s Last Will. Obviously a comprehensive analysis of the rates of grammatical inversion in all the plays of Shakespeare’s early contemporaries is beyond the scope of the present study, but my familiarity with the verse styles of Marlowe, Greene, and Peele—none of which exhibits anything like the obsessive reliance on grammatical inversion that Nashe’s does—leads to me seriously doubt whether any other playwright writing for the London stage in the early 1590s deployed grammatical inversion in his verse anywhere near as frequently as Nashe did.
5.3 Between ‘Traditional’ and ‘Non-Traditional’ Attribution Techniques This section presents more new evidence supporting the hypothesis that Shakespeare did not write all of 1 Henry VI and that Nashe wrote Act 1. It describes, and applies to 1 Henry VI, a new attribution technique recently developed by MacDonald P. Jackson and Gary Taylor, using the Chadwyck-Healey electronic database Literature Online. 270
The fundamental transparency of this technique—it involves no statistical functions, no ‘academic cyborgs’ trained to distinguish authors which their programmers cannot—derives from its using Literature Online merely as an electronic concordance, not as a stylometric application. 15 The Literature Online database represents one of the most practical and versatile partnerships of literature and technology currently available. The name of the database is no empty coinage. It signals Chadwyck-Healey’s intent to quite simply put all English literature online. Already Literature Online offers the full text of more than 350,000 works of poetry, drama and prose in English from the eighth century to the present day. The earliest authoritative text available for each Early Modern play is included. Each text is reproduced in full and prefaced by its bibliographical information. All search results are therefore derived from a database which has been compiled as objectively as possible. The importance of thoroughly explaining all aspects of the authorship ‘techniques’ one employs is crucial for both the validity of the individual study and for the reputation of attribution studies as a whole. Jackson has repeatedly surveyed the field over the last forty years, highlighting what he calls ‘inadequate methodologies’. 16 In Defining Shakespeare—‘Pericles’ as Test Case, he comprehensively debunks the ‘bad old practices’ still employed by critics like Eric Sams and Mark Dominik in their attempts to augment the Shakespeare canon. 17 Joseph Rudman has recently identified the same lack of discipline which undermines
15
See Harold Love, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge: CUP 2002), p. 161. Love coins the expression in his discussion of whether stylometry can legitimately be called a science. Love is not convinced that it can be at present. 16 Jackson 2003, p. 190 passim. 17 Ibid. pp. 190–2.
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the parallel collecting of Sams and Dominik in many of the copious studies published by ‘non traditional’ attribution scholars:
Non-traditional authorship attribution studies—those employing the computer, statistics, and stylistics—have had enough time to pass through any ‘shake-down’ phase and enter one marked by solid, scientific, and steadily progressing studies. But, after over 30 years and 300 publications, they have not…There is more wrong with authorship attribution studies than there is right. 18
The essential simplicity and transparency of the attribution technique to be employed here distinguishes it from Rudman’s ‘non-traditional’ attribution studies; as explained above, the Literature Online database is essentially employed as the world’s largest concordance of English literature, and the technique involves nothing more technical than the looking up of words in that concordance. 19 In Defining Shakespeare Jackson introduces the technique in the following way:
18
Joseph Rudman, ‘The State of Authorship Attribution Studies: Some Problems and Solutions’, CHum, 31 (1997–8), 351–65, at p. 351. Marcus Dahl’s unpublished PhD thesis, ‘The Authorship of The First Part of Henry Sixth: An Examination of Some Traditional and Non-Traditional Methods of Stylometric Attribution, in relation to the First Folio history play The First Part of Henry Sixth’, University of Bristol, 2004, applies Discriminant Analysis to the play, a mathematically complex stylometric application that is ultimately less demonstrative than the Literature Online technique applied in this chapter. Dahl concludes that ‘the balance of probabilities inclines against authorship other than Shakespeare’s for any part of this play; the play is ‘Shakespearean’ in that the hand no other author is demonstrable by the methods of analysis used in this study’(p. 2). Dahl’s thesis, of which I became aware only as my own was drawing to completion, is proof that, at least with respect to 1 Henry VI, elaborate non-traditional attribution techniques are less sensitive to the stylistic differences of the text than the more focused traditional techniques applied in the present study. None of Dahl’s analyses, for example, was able to uncover the extreme variation between the amount of grammatical inversion in Act 1 and that across the rest of the play which was documented in subsection 6.4 of the previous chapter. This variable alone argues more strongly against Shakespeare's sole authorship of the play in a single, limited period of time than all of Dahl's stylometric tests combined. Dahl makes no re-investigation of the extensive revision theories connected with the play. 19
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Mistakes in attribution arising from the haphazard and biased accumulation of verbal parallels can be avoided through systematic and comprehensive electronic searches. The method to be described is most readily applied to cases where (a) there is a small number of candidates for a scene or passage, and (b) each of these candidates was the sole author of several plays. But it can be adapted to yield significant results in less favourable situations. 20
The present study has already assembled a comprehensive authorship hypothesis for 1 Henry VI, but this new attribution technique has the potential to shed even more light on the benighted genesis of the play. It may be able to clarify Shakespeare’s precise contribution to 1 Henry VI, and, at the same time, uncover more evidence for Nashe’s authorship of Act 1. It may even be able to help identify the unknown Author Y who wrote Acts 2–5 of harey the vj. My application of the new technique to 1 Henry VI follows the methodology fully documented by Jackson in Defining Shakespeare. 21 Other than Shakespeare and Nashe, the three playwrights on whom parts of 1 Henry VI have been most often fathered down the centuries are Greene, Marlowe, and Peele. Literature Online enables the simultaneous searching of the works of these five playwrights for phrases and collocations present in the works of only one of them. Ideally, the dramatic canons of each authorial candidate should be the same size, but in reality, of course, they are not. Since Shakespeare’s dramatic legacy is much larger than those of the other candidates, a ‘restricted’ Shakespeare corpus was formed from the plays of his unquestioned authorship composed around the same time as 1 Henry VI. In an attempt to compensate for the genre-distortion created by such a reduction, the tragedy Romeo
20 21
Jackson 2003, p. 193. Ibid. pp. 190–217 and his Appendix 2.
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and Juliet (abbreviated for the purposes of this investigation to ‘Rom’) and the history Richard II (R2) were selected instead of the comedies Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. Both Romeo and Juliet and Richard II are dated 1595 in Textual Companion. The plays selected which were composed more contemporaneously with 1 Henry VI were:
Err
The Comedy of Errors
(1594)
R3
Richard III
(1592–3)
Shr
The Taming of the Shrew
(1590–1)
TGV
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
(1590–1)
The long narrative poem Venus and Adonis (VA), written in 1592–3, was also included. The following plays formed the Greene corpus:
ALG
A Looking-Glass for London and England
(1588)
Alp
Alphonsus, King of Aragon
(1587)
FBB
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
(1589)
J4
James the Fourth
(1590)
JB
John of Bordeaux
(1592)
Orl
Orlando Furioso
(1591)
Sel
Selimus
(1592)
The dates are those of the Schoenbaum–Harbage Annals of English Drama. 22 Not all of these plays are universally accepted as Greene’s. Four are certainly his unaided creations (Alphonsus, Friar Bacon, James IV, and Orlando). He is known to have
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collaborated on Looking-Glass with Thomas Lodge, and a strong case has been made for his authorship of John of Bordeaux, which is the sequel to Friar Bacon. 23 Greene is also the playwright most often put forward as the author of the anonymous Selimus. These three plays are included here to bring the Greene corpus to a size comparable with those of the other candidates; any hits they register will of course not be assumed to have definitely originated with Greene. All of Marlowe’s plays were searched:
Did
Dido, Queen of Carthage
(1586)
DF
Doctor Faustus
(1592)
E2
Edward II
(1592)
Jew
The Jew of Malta
(1589)
MP
The Massacre at Paris
(1593)
1TB
Tamburlaine, Part I
(1587)
2TB
Tamburlaine, Part II
(1588)
The 1594 title page of Dido reads ‘Written by Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nash’, but Nashe’s precise connection with the play remains uncertain. If he did collaborate with Marlowe, or even revise it while readying it for publication after Marlowe’s death, his dramatic canon would be considerably augmented: currently Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592) is the only piece of dramatic writing universally accepted as his. 24 Apart from the three-hundred-odd line erotic poem entitled The Choice of Valentines, about which McKerrow wrote: ‘There can, I fear,
22 A. Harbage, rev. Samuel Schoenbaum and S. Wagonheim, Annals of English Drama 975–1642 (London and New York: Methuen, 1989). 23 See especially Waldo F. McNeir, ‘Robert Greene and John of Bordeaux’, PMLA, 64 (1949), 781–801. 24 See McKerrow’s Nashe, iii, 235.
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be little doubt that this poem is the work of Nashe’, no other poetical works by Nashe are known to have survived. 25 We are therefore obliged to include some of Nashe’s prose works to make his corpus equivalent in size to those of the other playwrights. The obvious formal differences between Elizabethan verse and prose are offset to some degree, however, because the new technique involves searching a specified text word by word—not line by line—and thereby enables the comparison of the fundamental linguistic building blocks used by different authors in constructing their sentences. The prose works by Nashe included with Summer’s Last Will (SLW) and The Choice of Valentines (CV) were:
Len
Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe
(1599)
PP
Pierce Pennilesse
(1592)
Str
Strange Newes
(1593)
Unf
The Unfortunate Traveller
(1593)
And finally, the dramatic works of Peele searched were:
25
Alc
The Battle of Alcazar
(1589)
AP
The Arraignment of Paris
(1581)
DA
Descensus Astrae
(1591)
DB
David and Bethsabe
(1587)
E1
Edward I
(1591)
HC
The Hunting of Cupid
(1586)
OWT
The Old Wives’ Tale
(1590)
Ibid. v, 141.
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Many of these works are considerably shorter than the plays of Shakespeare, Greene, and Marlowe, and so the following poems by Peele were also included:
AF
Anglorum Feriae
HG
The Honour of the Garter
PC
The Praise of Chastity
War
The War of Troy
The technique involves the methodical keying in of the words, phrases, and collocations, one at a time, of every line of 1 Henry VI, and the searching of the five corpora above to see which of those phrases and collocations appear in the works of only one playwright. Even with the efficient application of the various search functions of Literature Online and a thorough knowledge of the possible late sixteenth-century spellings, it takes a considerable time—months, rather than weeks—to work through an entire play. 26 The context of every ‘hit’, or phrase or collocation found in the work(s) of only one author has to be visited and checked. Only one hit was scored however many times a phrase or collocation appeared in the works of one playwright and not in those of the others. Below are the hits registered by the opening fifty lines of 1 Henry VI; the authorial initial G(reene), M(arlowe), P(eele), N(ashe), or S(hakespeare) appears before the square bracketed abbreviation of the paralleled work:
‘times and states’ (2) is most closely paralleled by ‘state and time’ in S[R2;] ‘consented unto’ (5) appears in the present tense: ‘consent unto’ in G[Alp];
26
See Jackson 2003, pp. 196–7 for a guide to the most efficient use of the Literature Online search functions.
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‘with his beams’ (10) reappears in N[SLW]; ‘He…lift up his hand’ (16) is closely paralleled by ‘she…lift up her hands’ in N[Unf]; ‘mourn in black’ (17) appears in the past tense: ‘mourned all in black’ in N[Str]; ’We with our’ (21) reappears in M[1TB]; ‘triumphant car’ (22) reappears in M[E2]; ‘planets of mishap’ (23) appears in the singular form: ‘planet of mishap’ in G[Alp]; ‘subtle-witted’ (25) reappears in N[SLW]; ‘as was his’ (30) reappears in P[DB]; ‘like a school-boy’ (36) reappears in S[TGV]; ‘throughout the year’ (42) is paralleled by ‘throughout the whole year’ in N[Len]; ‘Instead of gold’ (46) reappears in M[Jew]; ‘made a nourish of’ (50) is paralleled by ‘making a nourishing food…of’ N[Unf].
As Jackson observes, ‘These data are, in themselves, much like those collected by Dominik and Sams, but in this case they have been collected according to predetermined [and fully documented] procedures that involve methodical searching of stipulated works by rival authorial candidates’. 27 It is interesting to note above that the shortish Summer’s Last Will, Nashe’s only play, registers the same number of hits as the Shakespearean corpus which includes six full-length plays. My application of the technique has established that of all the plays being searched, the distinctive compound adjective ‘subtle-witted’ appears only in the first scene of 1 Henry VI and Summer’s Last Will. By itself, this hit is of no great significance, but, as I discussed in the previous chapter, the nature and frequency of compound adjectives in 1 Henry VI inform our greater understanding of the different authorial styles present in the play.
27
Ibid. p. 194.
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Discussing the differences between the linkages identified by the new technique and those by old-fashioned parallel collecting, Jackson writes:
The theoretical looseness of the term ‘linkage’ is not bothersome in practice, so long as searching is systematic and comprehensive. The list [of hits] consists almost exclusively of groups of two or more words that are either consecutive or closely associated, and the requirement that these collocations should be confined to the canons of only one of the…playwrights ensures that high-frequency examples (such as “of the”) are ignored. Likenesses of image or idea are disregarded unless supported by significant verbal correspondence. Essentially, what is being investigated is the distinction between the… writers’ “idiolects”—their recurrent turns of phrase and juxtapositions. 28
The new technique allows researchers to read ‘within the lines’ of authors and to catalogue more precisely than ever before their unique use of the English language, from their syntactic idiosyncrasies through to their individual poetic expression. The complete listing of the hits registered by 1 Henry VI with the corpus of only one of the five authorial candidates: Greene, Marlowe, Nashe, Peele, or Shakespeare, can be found in the Appendix, where further explanation of what was considered to constitute a hit is also given. Before discussing the results, it is important to repeat that this study has already presented overwhelming evidence in favour of the hypothesis that the author of Act 1 of 1 Henry VI did not write anything else in the play and was not Shakespeare. It has also established more clearly than ever before that three—not four—playwrights are present in the text, and that 1 Henry VI is Shakespeare’s revision of Henslowe’s harey the vj, written by Y (Acts 2–5) and Z (Act 1). The
28
Ibid. p. 198.
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Literature Online results are not being presented in isolation. I am therefore able to confidently predict that the parts of the play ascribed to Shakespeare at the end of Chapter 4 (2.4, 4.2–5, and 4.7.1–32) will yield a significantly larger proportion of Shakespearean linkages than the rest of the play. The table on the following page presents a summary of the Shakespeare hits across 1 Henry VI. The results are nothing short of remarkable. The Rose Plucking scene (2.4), universally regarded as being the most Shakespearean of the play, registers an astonishing thirty-two Shakespeare hits (74.4 percent of the total) in 133 lines, four more than the twenty-eight registered in the 596 lines of Act 1. The four other scenes of Act 2—the 351 lines of 2.1–3 and 2.5—together register seven fewer Shakespeare hits than 2.4. If Shakespeare had written all of Acts 1 and 2 at the same time, this distribution effectively means that when he came to compose 2.4, he suddenly began to write over five times more like he did in The Comedy of Errors, Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Venus and Adonis than he had done in Act 1 and over three times more ‘like himself’ than he did in the rest of Act 2. The scenes and part-scene I attribute to Shakespeare fill six of the top eight rankings when the twenty-seven scenes of the traditionally-divided 1 Henry VI are ordered according to the percentage of Shakespeare linkages they exhibit. From the highest to the lowest they are: 2.4 (74.4 percent); 4.7.1–32 (72.2 percent), 4.4 (60.0 percent); 4.2 (52.9 percent); 4.3 (50.0 percent); 3.4 (41.7 percent); 5.1 (40.0 percent) and 4.5 (35.3 percent). Ideally every scene of the play would be, like 2.4, at least one hundred lines in length for the accuracy of my percentage calculations. But the sequence of 4.2–4 totals 155 lines and the Shakespeare linkages therein represent 53.7
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Table 13: Summary of Literature Online hits for Shakespeare in scenes of 1 Henry VI
Scene
Shakespeare hits
Total hits
1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6
7 8 2 9 1 1
40 30 15 40 8 10
17.5 26.7 13.3 22.5 12.5 10.0
Act 1
28
143
19.6
2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5
8 5 2 32 10
27 21 19 43 38
29.6 22.7 10.5 74.4 26.3
Act 2 (-2.4)
25
105
23.8
3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4
17 10 6 5
63 36 26 12
27.0 27.8 22.2 41.7
Act 3
38
137
27.7
4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7.1–32 4.7.33–96
12 9 7 6 6 5 13 7
51 17 14 10 17 15 18 24
23.5 52.9 50.0 60.0 35.3 33.3 72.2 29.2
Act 4 (-4.1, 4.6, 4.7.33– 96)
41
76
53.9
5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5
6 0 15 17 3
15 4 58 59 44
40.0 0.0 25.9 28.8 6.8
Act 5
41
180
22.8
2.4, 4.2–5, 4.7.1–32
73
119
61.3
281
Percentage Shakespeare
percent of the total registered. The fact that 4.5 is the lowest ranked of the scenes attributed to Shakespeare should not surprise us; the scene is Shakespeare’s rewriting of Y’s 4.6 and, as Dover Wilson and Pearlman have remarked, he adopted much of the vocabulary of 4.6 as he composed 4.5. That vocabulary, I have argued, is Y’s, and the percentage of Shakespeare linkages in 4.6 (33.3 percent) is not incompatible with the percentages registered by the following Y scenes: 2.1 (29.6 percent); 2.5 (26.3 percent); 3.1 (27.0 percent); 3.2 (27.8 percent); 5.3 (25.9 percent) and 5.4 (28.8 percent). The tendency of Y’s scenes to return a roughly ‘30 percent Shakespearean’ result is seen again in the 29.2 percent of Shakespeare linkages in 4.7.33–96 (shown in the previous chapter to also be the work of Y). The sixth-ranked scene, 3.4, is just forty-five lines long and registers only twelve hits in total, five of which are with the Shakespeare corpus. If we compare it with the first thirty-two lines of 4.7, we see that more than twice as many Shakespeare linkages appear there in two-thirds of the number of lines. The first forty-five lines of 2.4 register no less than twelve Shakespeare linkages. The seventh-ranked scene, 5.1, is sixty-two lines long and registers fifteen hits in total. The complete data for the scene in the Appendix reveal the scene to be almost as Marlovian (33.3 percent) as it is Shakespearean (40.0 percent), and that the Marlowe linkages are generally more specific and more striking than the Shakespeare ones. The Literature Online investigation strongly supports the attribution of 2.4, 4.2– 5, 4.7.1–32 and only those scenes of 1 Henry VI to Shakespeare; the percentage of Shakespeare linkages across Shakespeare’s work on the play is 61.3. Across the nonShakespearean scenes of the play the percentage is 23.8. In Defining Shakespeare, Jackson applies a modified form of the Literature Online technique to the whole of Pericles, and identifies the phrases and collocations shared by that play with either 282
The Tempest or George Wilkins’s play The Miseries of Enforced Marriage. The results dramatically reinforce his multi-faceted case for Wilkins having written the first two acts of Pericles and Shakespeare having written Acts 3–5. The percentage of Shakespeare linkages (with The Tempest) across the last three acts of Pericles is 60.8, a figure remarkably close to that for the Shakespearean scenes of 1 Henry VI. Only 26.1 percent of the linkages Jackson records in the Wilkinsian acts of Pericles are Shakespearean, a result which is again very compatible with the non-Shakespearean scenes of 1 Henry VI. 29 These similarities may be coincidental, however, as the situations are very different: Jackson was comparing the number of hits registered by Pericles with Miseries and The Tempest, whereas I am using five authorial groups. Introducing his ‘control texts’, Jackson quotes some extremely important remarks recently made by Taylor concerning attribution studies which are certainly worth re-emphasising:
Bibliographers and textual critics must begin to do what scientists routinely, and literary critics never, do: take the time to test whether our methods can prove something we already know. Only in that way can we prove something we otherwise could never really know for sure: that our technologies of attribution produce reliable results. 30
The reliability of the particular ‘technology of attribution’ used in this chapter can be tested by applying it to the first hundred lines of Richard III, the Shakespearean authenticity of which is today universally accepted. 31 This play formed part of the
29 The remarkable precision of the Literature Online technique presented Jackson with strong reasons to believe Wilkins also took some part in the writing of the brothel scenes in Pericles; 4.2 and 4.6 (Jackson 2003, pp. 203– 17). 30 Gary Taylor, ‘Middleton and Rowley—and Heywood: The Old Law and New Attribution Technologies’, PBSA, 96 (2002), 165–217, at pp. 166–7. 31 The text used was that of The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn.
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Shakespeare ‘restricted canon’ used in the application of the technique to 1 Henry VI; its removal reduces the Shakespeare corpus by over 3,000 lines of verse, or roughly one-sixth. Nevertheless, of the thirty-seven linkages registered by I.i.1–100 of Richard III with exactly the same Greene, Marlowe, Nashe and Peele corpora, and the reduced ‘restricted’ Shakespeare corpus, nineteen, or 51.4 percent, are Shakespearean. The candidate with the next highest total is Marlowe, with seven hits, or 18.9 percent. It would seem that it is no coincidence that the percentage of Shakespearean linkages in the first hundred lines of Richard III (51.4) is almost exactly five-sixths of the percentage of Shakespearean linkages returned by the Shakespearean scenes of 1 Henry VI (61.3). We are now able to demonstrate more precisely than ever before that 2.4, 4.2–5, 4.7.1–32, and only those sections of 1 Henry VI, are as Shakespearean as the opening hundred lines of Richard III. The Literature Online results also remove some of the uncertainty surrounding the date of Shakespeare’s revision of harey the vj. Of the sixty-seven Shakespeare linkages registered by the five other plays in the Shakespeare restricted canon across his contribution to 1 Henry VI, thirty-one are with Richard III; seventeen with Richard II; seven with Romeo and Juliet; six with The Taming of the Shrew; and two with both The Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. We should of course expect the Shakespeare of 1 Henry VI to share more rare vocabulary with history plays than with comedies and tragedies, and allowance has to be made for the absence of 2 and 3 Henry VI and Titus Andronicus from the corpus due to their uncertain/mixed authorship. But given the extremely tight focus of the Literature Online technique, the very high hit total for Richard III, which is dated 1592–3 by the Oxford editors, and the fact that the next highest-registering plays are both dated in 1595, it would seem that the conclusions of Chambers, Gaw, and Mincoff that 284
Shakespeare revised harey the vj in 1594 are in some way reinforced by the distribution of the Shakespeare hits in 2.4, 4.2–5, 4.7.1–32 across the restricted canon. In order to refine further our understanding of the date of Shakespeare’s work on 1 Henry VI we would need to apply the new technique to all Shakespeare’s early plays, which would obviously require another thesis or indeed theses.
5.4 The New Technique and Nashe The Literature Online-assisted investigation into the authorship of 1 Henry VI has confirmed the accuracy of my conclusion in the previous chapter concerning the extent of Shakespeare’s contribution to the Folio text; is it able to strengthen the already very strong case assembled for Nashe having authored Act 1? Because Nashe’s literary legacy contains so little drama and poetry, it was unavoidable that his corpus for the Literature Online investigation would be more than 80 percent prose. The following remarks made by Jackson in his discussion of the results obtained from his application of the Literature Online technique to Pericles are therefore reassuring:
Although [Wilkins’s The Miseries of Enforced Marriage] has a higher proportion of prose than The Tempest, it seems unlikely that there is a more general tendency, independent of authorship, for prose to be more closely linked in phraseology with prose than with verse, because 2.1, the scene in which Pericles encounters the fishermen, contains a fair amount of prose and yet yields percentages of Shakespeare and Wilkins linkages very close to those for Pericles, 1–2, as a whole. 32
32
Jackson 2003, p. 206.
285
Jackson’s experiences with Pericles reinforce my earlier remarks about the extraordinarily tight focus of the new technique being able to offset, to some extent, the differences between Early Modern prose and verse. The table on the following page summarises the distribution of the Literature Online linkages between 1 Henry VI and the Nashe corpus described in the previous section. Once again, the results are very suggestive. The full listing of hits in the Appendix reveals that in four of the six scenes in Act 1 (1.1, 1.2, 1.5 and 1.6), Nashe is the candidate with the highest percentage of linkages, a scenario that is not repeated in any scene outside of the first act. In 1.3 the Nashe corpus registers four linkages, second only to the Marlowe corpus, which exhibits five. The last concerted effort to father parts of 1 Henry VI on Marlowe was made by Allison Gaw in 1926; he failed spectacularly. 33 Not the slightest trace of Marlowe’s hand was detected by the exhaustive investigation into the authorship of the play carried out in Chapter 4. That investigation also found no trace of Shakespeare’s hand in Act 1, a finding which is emphatically supported by the 89 lines of 1.3 registering only two Shakespeare linkages; the first 89 lines of 2.4 register no less than twenty-four, which is only four less than the total number of Shakespeare linkages registered by the whole of Act 1. The technique applied in this chapter is able to shed light on the degree to which Marlowe’s dramatic vocabulary was adopted by his contemporaries. Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’ revolutionised English drama, and every student of the period is aware that his influence was second to none in last decade of the sixteenth century. The number of Marlowe linkages registered by Act 1 (thirty-eight) is only four less than
33 More recently, in ‘Tamburlaine Stalks in Henry VI’, CHum, 30 (1996), 267–80, Thomas Merriam has argued for Marlowe’s presence in the play, but his elaborate, ‘non-traditional’ attribution technique proves only that all of Marlowe’s contemporaries extensively plundered his dramatic vocabulary, especially that of the Tamburlaine plays, a fact that has long been recognised by ‘traditional’ attribution scholars.
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Table 14: Summary of Literature Online hits for Nashe in scenes of 1 Henry VI
Scene
Nashe hits
Total hits
Percentage Nashe
1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6
13 12 4 7 3 3
40 30 15 40 8 10
32.5 40.0 26.7 17.5 37.5 30.0
Act 1
42
143
29.4
2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5
6 2 3 3 7
27 21 19 43 38
22.2 9.1 15.8 7.0 18.4
Act 2
21
148
14.2
3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4
10 2 3 1
63 36 26 12
15.9 5.6 11.5 8.3
Act 3
16
137
11.7
4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7
7 1 1 3 2 1 6
51 17 14 10 17 15 42
13.7 5.9 7.1 30.0 11.8 6.7 14.3
Act 4
21
166
12.7
5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5
2 0 7 12 11
15 4 58 59 44
13.3 0.0 12.1 20.3 25.0
Act 5
32
180
17.8
287
the number of Nashe linkages in the same act. No less than thirteen Marlowe linkages register in 1.4, which is nearly double the number of Nashe ones. The fact that Marlowe is the candidate with the highest percentage of linkages for 1.3 and 1.4 does not threaten the attribution of those scenes to Nashe in the slightest. There are five more Nashe linkages in Act 1 (forty-two) than there are in Acts 2 and 3 combined (thirty-seven), and the overall percentage of Nashe linkages for Act 1 is more than twice that for each of Acts 2, 3, and 4. The significance of 1.1 exhibiting no less than five linkages with Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will, whose subject matter could not be more removed from the reign of Henry VI, is especially strong considering that in the same scene only seven linkages are registered by the Shakespeare corpus, which contains more than ten times as much dramatic verse. To test the reliability of the new technique with respect to Nashe, it was applied to one hundred lines of Summer’s Last Will (105–205), most of which are written in verse. 34 The same corpora were used, and the results are listed in the Appendix. Because Summer’s Last Will is currently the extent of Nashe’s dramatic canon, the two intra-play linkages that were identified were included in the Nashe total, after making sure that they recurred outside of the hundred-line control sample. Of the twenty-nine linkages registered by the control text with the same corpora used with 1 Henry VI, twelve or 41.4 percent are with the Nashe corpus. This percentage is almost exactly the same as that returned by the 150 lines of 1.2 of 1 Henry VI, and the percentage for Act 1 as whole (29.4) is at least eleven percentage points closer to that of the control text than the other acts of the play. It is also interesting to note that the percentage of Shakespeare linkages in Summer’s Last Will ll. 105–205 is 20.7, which
34
McKerrow’s text was used (Nashe, iii).
288
closely corresponds to the average percentage of Shakespeare linkages in Act 1 of 1 Henry VI (19.6). This of course means that the Literature Online technique is unable to distinguish between the two samples with respect to their Shakespeareaness, and that Act 1 of 1 Henry VI is considerably more Nashean than the rest of the play. As the previous chapter demonstrated, if Shakespeare authored all of the play at the same time, between Act 1 and the rest of the play he (1) drastically changed the frequency and nature of his classical allusions; (2) altered just as drastically the frequency and nature of his biblical allusions, and (3) decided to stop using grammatical inversion at the compulsive rate of one every eight lines and to only use it, on average, less than once every fifty lines for the remainder of the play. The conclusion of the previous chapter that Shakespeare did not write Act 1 of 1 Henry VI is powerfully reinforced by the Literature Online evidence. The very strong case advanced by Dover Wilson and Taylor that Act 1 was written by Nashe is given equally strong reinforcement by both my analysis of the grammatical inversion in Summer’s Last Will and the distribution of the Nashe linkages in 1 Henry VI. Surely now, Taylor’s conclusion to his case for Nashe in ‘Shakespeare and Others’ will not continue to be ignored by future editors and critics of the play:
Cumulatively, the internal evidence for identifying the author of [Act 1] with Thomas Nashe is so multi-faceted, so consistent, and so strong, that he should hereafter be recognized as a collaborator, with as much right to a share of the title page as Fletcher in The Two Noble Kinsmen and All is True, as Middleton in Timon of Athens, as Wilkins in Pericles. If Nashe did not write act 1, then it must have been written by another dramatist of the early 1590s whose works have utterly perished, and whose works were in every
289
respect indistinguishable from Nashe’s own. I will therefore drop the pretense of identifying the author of act 1 as “Z,” and henceforth openly identify him as Nashe. 35
5.5 Who ‘Y’ Was Not As noted earlier in this chapter, after Shakespeare and Nashe, the three playwrights most often thought by previous critics to be present in 1 Henry VI are Greene, Marlowe and Peele. The table on the following page summarises the phrasal linkages, expressed in percentage form, which Y’s scenes in 1 Henry VI exhibit with the Greene, Marlowe, and Peele corpora as defined above in section 3. What can these results tell us about the identity of Author Y? The fact that for all of the candidates none of their act averages is higher than 25.6 percent would seem to markedly distinguish all of their plays from Y’s work on 1 Henry VI. In order to test this preliminary conclusion, a one-hundred line sample from Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (A-text), and Peele’s Edward I were selected as control texts and rigorously searched for any linkages they shared with the corpora of only one of Greene, Marlowe, Nashe, Peele, or Shakespeare. 36 In each case the known author registered the highest number of linkages: the Friar Bacon passage exhibits six Greene linkages (twice as many as the next highest candidates), or 37.5 percent; the Doctor Faustus passage exhibits eighteen Marlowe linkages (eight more than the next highest candidates), or 34.6 percent, and the Edward I passage registers sixteen Peele linkages (just one more than the next highest candidate, Marlowe), or
35
Taylor 1995, p. 177. For Greene and Peele, the texts used were those of Alexander Dyce (ed.), The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Robert Greene & George Peele (London: Routledge, 1874) and for Marlowe, that of David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (eds.), Christopher Marlowe, 'Doctor Faustus' and Other Plays (Oxford: OUP, 1995). 36
290
Table 15: Summary of Literature Online hits for Greene, Marlowe, and Peele in Y’s scenes of 1 Henry VI Scene
Percentage Greene
Percentage Marlowe
Percentage Peele
2.1
29.6
11.1
7.4
2.2
22.7
18.2
27.3
2.3
26.3
42.1
5.3
2.5
15.8
21.1
18.4
Average for 2.1–3, 2.5
22.9
21.0
15.2
3.1
28.6
19.0
9.5
3.2
22.2
27.8
16.7
3.3
26.9
34.6
3.8
3.4
16.7
8.3
25.0
Average for Act 3
25.5
23.4
11.7
4.1
17.6
27.4
15.7
4.6
13.3
33.3
13.3
4.7.33–96
12.5
8.3
33.3
Average for 4.1, 4.6, 4.7.33–
15.6
24.4
20.0
5.1
0.0
33.3
13.3
5.2 (21 lines with 4 hits total)
0.0
100.0
0.0
5.3
19.0
27.6
15.5
5.4
20.3
20.3
10.0
5.5
36.4
20.5
11.4
Average for Act 5
21.7
25.6
12.2
96
291
37.2 percent. After Marlowe, Peele is the candidate whose presence in 1 Henry VI is easiest to rule out: 37.2 percent is more than twice the average percentage across all of Y’s work on the play. The fact that the first hundred lines of Edward I are very nearly as Marlovian as they are Peelean—in terms of their Literature Online linkages—provides another illustration of the pervasiveness of Marlowe’s dramatic vocabulary in the works of his contemporaries. Dover Wilson was convinced that Greene drafted Acts 2–5 of 1 Henry VI which Shakespeare then hurriedly, and therefore incompletely, revised before the play’s first performance at the Rose theatre on 3 March 1592. The percentage of Greene linkages in the first one hundred lines of Friar Bacon is higher than the equivalent percentage for every one of the Y scenes. The scene that approaches nearest is 5.5, with 36.4 percent Greene linkages, but in the eighty-three lines of 5.1 and 5.2, not one Greene linkage is registered, and 5.3 and 5.4 average less than 20 percent. These variations across Act 5, all of which I attributed to Y in the previous chapter, suggest that Y was not Greene. In the previous chapter I showed that of all the scenes written by Y in 1 Henry VI, only 4.3, 4.4, and 4.7 exhibit significant evidence of mixed authorship. I found absolutely no evidence to support Dover Wilson’s attributing of the wide fluctuations he detected in the verse quality of Acts 2, 3, and 5 to Shakespeare’s intermittent improving of another’s prosaic verse. The Literature Online results in Table 15 suggest that whoever Y was, his writing across Acts 2–5 exhibits a fairly consistent degree of similarity to the plays of Greene and Marlowe, and a lesser, though still as consistent, degree of similarity to those of Peele.
5.6 The Author of Acts 2–5 of harey the vj 292
I demonstrated in Chapter 4 that Y’s verse rarely rises above journeyman competence and only seems to flow easily in climactic set-pieces. In both the Tower scene (2.5) and the Coronation scene (4.1), his ability to elevate the quality of his verse is manifest. In the earlier scene, the dying Mortimer has only just enough breath left to inform his nephew Richard of his destiny and suddenly the playwright’s writing becomes more inspired. 37 The comparative richness of a good deal of the verse in 2.5 stems more from the situation than inspired scene construction—section 6 of Chapter 2 showed how primitive its dramaturgy is compared with that of Shakespeare’s Rose Plucking scene (2.4). More momentous events occur in the Coronation scene than in any other scene of the play: Henry is crowned in Paris; Talbot denounces the cowardly Fastolf before his King; Vernon and Basset bring the factioning of York and Somerset out into the open, before the court, and Henry favours a red rose and unwittingly sows the seeds of York’s rebellion. From most of 4.1’s highly charged 196 lines Y was able to banish his habitual blunderings. But he generally found the faults documented in section 9 of the previous chapter impossible to avoid for very long when constructing his iambic pentameters. He clearly had to work hard when creating his verse, and its limping feet very seldom manage to leap poetically. Chapter 2 uncovered Y’s real strength: his plotting ability. In his Arden3 edition of the play, Burns imputes rather too much of a twentieth-century consciousness to the authors and original audiences of 1 Henry VI, but he does usefully connect late sixteenth- and late twentieth-century box offices in his discussion of ‘prequels’:
37
This is seen most obviously in the proliferation of compound adjectives: ‘Nestor-like’ (2.5.6), ‘Swift-winged’ (2.5.15), ‘late-despisèd’ (2.5.36), ‘first-begotten’ (2.5.65), and ‘Strong-fixèd’ (2.5.102).
293
With several other recent commentators, I take the view that the play is what in the Hollywood terms of the late twentieth century is known as a ‘prequel’, a dramatic piece that returns for ironic and challenging effect to the narrative roots of an already familiar story. There is in fact nothing in 1 Henry VI that we need to know to follow the story of Parts Two and Three… So, in this edition 1 Henry VI is a free-standing piece, designed originally to draw on audience knowledge of the two earlier plays for ominous and ironic effect, but enjoyable on its own as a witty and spectacular piece of physical theatre. 38
Composing without the manuscripts of the plays printed in the Folio as 2 and 3 Henry VI before him, Y was nevertheless able to design a play that broke attendance records—‘ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times)’—at the Rose theatre in 1592, a play that Shakespeare, at the time of the original performances, had not ‘a finger in’. 39 Despite having demonstrated more clearly than ever before that Greene, Marlowe, and Peele played no part in the composition of harey the vj, this chapter has had little success in identifying the author of the bulk of that play. But by utilising the results of Bill Lloyd’s ‘Connective Analysis’ of the Shakespeare canon and applying them to my authorial division of 1 Henry VI, Jackson has been able to advance our knowledge of Y’s linguistic idiosyncrasies. 40 As recorded in section 5 of the previous chapter, Shakespeare had a clear preference for ‘among’ over ‘amongst’ and ‘between’ over ‘betwixt’. He also showed a strong preference for ‘besides’ over
38
Burns 2000, pp. 5–6. This expression was used by Thomas Heywood in an address to the reader for the 1633 quarto of his play The English Traveller, in which he states that he had written or at least ‘had a maine finger in’ 220 plays. See Bentley 1971, p. 27. 40 Privately. 39
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‘beside’. 41 In 1 Henry VI, Shakespeare’s preferred forms of these three connectives are distributed as follows:
‘between’: 2.4.10, 2.4.11, 2.4.12, 2.4.13, 2.4.14, 2.4.15, 2.4.126, 5.1.6, 5.3.92 ‘among’: 2.5.47, 5.1.14, 5.5.93 ‘besides’: 3.3.60
The non-preferred forms are distributed as follows:
‘betwixt’: 1.1.106, 3.1.139, 3.1.188, 4.1.96, 4.1.119, 4.1.131, 5.4.99 ‘amongst’: 1.1.70, 1.4.49 (‘’mongst’), 2.2.24, 3.1.181, 4.1.138, 4.7.83, 5.2.6 ‘beside’: 3.1.24, 3.4.8, 4.1.25, 4.1.143, 5.1.15, 5.5.46.
The occurrences of these six forms in the parts of 1 Henry VI authored by Nashe, Shakespeare and Y are summarised below:
Shakespeare’s Preferred Forms
Shakespeare’s Non-preferred Forms
Nashe
0
3
Shakespeare
7
0
Y
6
17
Less significantly, Shakespeare used ‘while’ or ‘whiles’ twice as often as ‘whilst’, though ‘whilst’ is nevertheless quite common and predominates over ‘while(s)’ in several plays. The distribution of the three forms in each author’s scenes (taking 4.3 and 4.4 as all Shakespeare’s) is summarised below:
41
Literature Online reveals that instances of ‘besides’ outnumber those of ‘beside’ in Shakespeare’s plays (including his collaborations) by 117 to 35.
295
while
whiles
whilst
Nashe
0
1
1
Shakespeare
2
3
0
Y
2
0
3
Shakespeare’s scenes, with five preferred forms and zero non-preferred, contrast with the rest of 1 Henry VI, which exhibits three preferred forms and four non-preferred. With his characteristic tenacity, Jackson goes on to make a further point about Shakespeare’s use of ‘besides’ and ‘beside’. Half of the examples of his non-preferred ‘beside’ in the canon fall at the end of a verse line or speech, whereas only six of the examples of ‘besides’ fall in these positions, and two of these should be discounted: one in Henry VIII or All is True is in Fletcher’s II.ii, and one in Cymbeline is in mid sentence and comes at the end of a run-on line. Shakespeare’s preference for ‘besides’ within verse lines and in prose is thus very strong indeed. Apart from 1 Henry VI, only Henry VIII has more than a single example of ‘beside’ falling within a verse line, and one of its two is in Fletcher’s Prologue. The fact that all but one of the six examples of ‘beside’ in 1 Henry VI (a total twice that of the single-authored Shakespearean play with the next highest number of ‘beside’s: Love’s Labour’s Lost) occur within lines is therefore highly significant. Those within lines are at 3.1.24, 3.4.8, 4.1.143, 5.1.15, and 5.5.46—all in scenes which I attribute to Y. The exception occurs at 4.1.25, which was, I have argued, also authored by Y. Author Y thus emerges as a dramatist who preferred ‘betwixt’ to ‘between’ (6/2), ‘amongst’ to ‘among’ (5/3), ‘whilst’ to ‘while(s)’ (3/2), and ‘beside’ to ‘besides’ (6/1), and who freely used ‘beside’ within a line. The combined ratio of his 296
preferred forms is 20/8. Using Literature Online, Jackson was able to determine which plays dated between 1580 and 1595 use all four of Y’s preferred forms at least once. Only sixteen plays from the period qualified initially, but a further three were added after the spelling ‘whilest’ was keyed in instead of ‘whilst’. ‘Whilest’ happens to be the 1 Henry VI spelling, but the spelling variant may be of little consequence since compositors and scribes were much more inclined to alter authorial spellings than actual forms. More rigorous searching was then carried out of each individual play for both Y’s preferred and non-preferred forms. The contexts for each ‘while’ needed to be visited, since the many examples of ‘a while’, ‘the while’, ‘a little while’, ‘mean while’ and so on, are irrelevant to our inquiry. It transpires that although all nineteen plays have at least one example of each of Y’s preferred forms, several of them actually favour all, three, or two of Y’s non-preferred forms. Given that Y’s preferences for ‘betwixt’ and ‘beside’ are stronger than his preferences for ‘amongst’ and ‘whilst’, the following plays provide the closest matches:
The Weakest Goeth to the Wall (anon.) amongst
6
among
0
betwixt
4
between
1
whilst
7
while
1
beside
6
besides
0
TOTAL
23
2
2 Edward IV (attributed to Thomas Heywood) amongst
1
among
1
betwixt
7
between
0
whilst
5
while
3
beside
10
besides
5
297
TOTAL
23
9
A Larum for London (anon.) amongst
3
among
1
betwixt
1
between
0
whilst
8
while
1
beside
2
besides
0
TOTAL
14
2
The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (tentatively attributed to Anthony Munday) amongst
2
among
3
betwixt
2
between
0
whilst
1
while
2
beside
1
besides
0
TOTAL
6
5
Soliman and Perseda (attributed to Thomas Kyd) amongst
3
among
1
betwixt
1
between
1
whilst
2
while
2
beside
2
besides
2
TOTAL
8
6
Arden of Faversham (anon.) amongst
3
among
2
betwixt
1
between
0
whilst
8
while
1
beside
1
besides
2
298
TOTAL
13
4
Cleopatra (Samuel Daniel) amongst
1
among
1
betwixt
1
between
2
whilst
10
while
1
beside
2
besides
0
TOTAL
14
4
Edward I (Peele) amongst
3
among
3
betwixt
1
between
1
whilst
6
while
6
beside
1
besides
0
TOTAL
11
10
Only two of these plays exhibit the spelling ‘whilest’: The Weakest Goeth to the Wall (twice) and Arden of Faversham (six times). The first of these plays is in fact the best match for Y’s connective preferences, but because it is both anonymous and of uncertain date, we initially appear to have run up against yet another brick wall in the search for Y’s identity. Literature Online seems to have misdated the play, since Annals of English Drama dates it 1600, and tentatively ascribes it ‘in part’ to Thomas Dekker. Literature Online also dates the next best matches, 2 Edward IV and A Larum for London, differently from Annals: according to the latter both were written in 1599. To further compound our frustration, even a superficial investigation into Literature Online’s attribution of 2 Edward IV to Heywood proves that it is little more than an educated guess: a Literature Online search for the occurrences of ‘ye’ in Heywood’s 299
single-authored plays reveals that the two Edward IV plays contain 159 ‘ye’s, whereas the thirteen other Heywood plays in the database exhibit just 57 combined. That none of those thirteen plays display Y’s connective preferences also, of course, tells strongly against Heywood’s participation in 1 Henry VI. Nevertheless, Jackson’s determination of Y’s preferred connective forms certainly lays a foundation for further investigation into the authorship of 1 Henry VI, and this particular linguistic test may well be able to shed light on the tenebrous limbo of anonymity so many Early Modern plays inhabit.
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CONCLUSION
1 Henry VI is one of the least performed and most frequently adapted plays included in the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623; it is also, as this study has sought to demonstrate with new precision, the least Shakespearean. My extensive examination of the external and internal evidence for the play’s genesis has revealed the nature of 1 Henry VI’s singularity to a much fuller extent than previous studies have been able to. In a sense—a considerably more complex sense than is generally recognised—it is correct to describe the Folio 1 Henry VI as ‘Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI’. But it is just as correct to describe the play Henslowe called ‘harey the vj’ in his Diary entries of 1592–3 as ‘Nashe and Another’s harey the vj’, the play Shakespeare later revised into 1 Henry VI. Before this study, no convincing argument had been advanced for Shakespeare having worked on a Folio play solely as a reviser, and I do not believe the same argument can be convincingly advanced for any other play included in that volume by Heminge and Condell. Of all the ways in which this study has shown 1 Henry VI to be an exceptional Shakespearean play, it is perhaps this particular demonstration that most challenges our current understanding of Shakespeare’s beginnings as a playwright. If he was not collaborating on harey the vj in late 1591 and early 1592, what was he doing? If, as seems most likely, he revised harey the vj for the Chamberlain’s Men in 1594, then, as what Bentley calls the ‘attached professional dramatist’ of his company, he was already as established as he would ever be in London’s theatrical community. The ‘Shakespeare’ of 1 Henry VI—2.4, 4.2, 4.3–4 (containing elements of an anonymous playwright’s original), 4.5, and 4.7.1–32—has 301
been re-contextualised by this study which will, I hope, inspire further investigation into Shakespeare’s—and his early contemporaries’—dramatic style.
302
APPENDIX Literature Online DATA The Literature Online data discussed in Chapter 5 are recorded in compressed form below. The main list is of phrases and collocations that 1 Henry VI shares with one of the canons described in Chapter 5—with works by only one of Greene, Marlowe, Nashe, Peele, or Shakespeare. References are to Hattaway’s 1990 New Cambridge edition of 1 Henry VI, and phrases are given in the precise form in which they appear there, except that actual misprints introduced by Hattaway have been corrected. Capitalisation beginning lines has been preserved and line endings are indicated. Where a phrase is listed once between semicolons the wording of the two linked plays is exactly the same, though the spelling, capitalisation, and punctuation may differ: I have modernised these incidentals which occur in the Literature Online texts. Where the linked play has a variation on the 1 Henry VI phrase, this variation follows a colon. A phrase that appears more than once in a linked play is given only a single entry. Each entry is followed by the initial of the linked playwright and the abbreviation of their specific work, as listed in Chapter 5. To be recorded, phrases and collocations had to consist of at least two words, except that compound words were included. Verbal matchings have been ignored when the meaning is clearly different. Also ignored were collocations consisting of an article plus a noun, or of a simple nominative personal pronoun (‘I’, ‘thou’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’, ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘they’) followed by an ordinary indicative verb.
Act 1, scene 1 (177 lines):
303
2 ‘times and states’: ‘state and time’ S[R2]; 5 ‘consented unto’: ‘consent unto’ G[Alp]; 10 ‘with his beams’ N[SLW]; 16 ‘He…lift up his hand’: ‘she…lift up her hands’ N[Unf];‘mourn in black’: ‘mourned all in black’ N[Str]; 21’We with our’ M[1TB]; 22 ‘triumphant car’ M[E2]; 23 ‘planets of mishap’: ‘planet of mishap’ G[Alp]; 25 ‘subtlewitted’ N[SLW]; 30 ‘as was his’ P[DB]; 36 ‘like a school-boy’ S[TGV]; ‘throughout the year’: ‘throughout the whole year’ N[Len]; ‘Instead of gold’ M[Jew]; 50 ‘made a nourish of’: ‘making a nourishing food…of’ N[Unf]; 52 ‘thy ghost I invocate’: ‘I invocate thy ghost’ S[R3]; 55 ‘A far more’ P[DB]; 61 ‘quite lost’ S[R2]; 63 ‘great towns’ N[SLW]; 68 ‘treachery was used’: ‘treachery used’ S[TGV]; 70 ‘Amongst the soldiers’: ‘among the soldiers’ G[J4]; 74 ‘ling’ring wars’ N[PP]; 78 ‘Awake, awake’ S[R3]; 81 ‘cut away’ S[R3]; 85 ‘steeled coat’: ‘steeled coats’ G[Alp]; 92 ‘crowned king’ N[Unf]; 101 ‘An army have I mustered’: ‘I’ll muster up an army’ M[MP]; 111 ‘Retiring from’ N[Unf]; 112 ‘in his troop’: ‘in his troops’ G[Sel]; 117 ‘sharp stakes’: ‘sharp…stake’ N[Unf]; 126 ‘All the whole’ N[SLW]; 127 ‘undaunted spirit’ M[E2]; ‘struck one stroke’: 141 ‘slay myself’: ‘slain myself’ M[DF]; 142 ‘living idly’: ‘living idle’ M[1TB]; 145 ‘took prisoner’ G[Alp]; ‘hale…headlong’: ‘Haling him headlong’ M[2TB]; 156 ‘make all Europe quake’: ‘made all Europe quake’ M[1TB]; 161 ‘such a multitude’ M[2TB]; 164 ‘in obedience’ G[FBB]; 172 ‘best devise’ P[HC]; 177 ‘sit at…stern’: ‘sit at stern’ N[SLW].
40 hits: Greene 7 (17.5%); Marlowe 10 (25.0%); Nashe 13 (32.5%); Peele 3 (7.5%); Shakespeare 7 (17.5%).
Act 1, scene 2 (150 lines): 4 ‘Now we are…’ S[TGV]; 6 ‘here we lie’ N[SLW]; 8 ‘one hour in’ S[R3]; 11 ‘provender tied to their mouths’: ‘provender hung at his mouth’ N[SLW]; 13 ‘why live we’ M[1TB]; 15 ‘mad-brained’ S[Shr]; 24 ‘But that they’ S[R2]; 26 ‘weary of his life’: ‘weary of this life’ M[2TB]; 28 ‘rush upon’: ‘rusht upon’ N[Unf]; 31 ‘During the time’ N[Len]; 33‘For none but’ N[PP]; 38 ‘more eager’ N[Unf]; 39 ‘with their teeth’ M[2TB]; 44 ‘let them alone’ P[OWT]; 50 ‘be not dismayed’ G[J4]; 52–3 ‘heaven/Ordained’:
304
‘ordained by heaven’ M[1TB]; 61 ‘in my place’ S[Err]; 79 ‘full of majesty’ G[FBB]; 82 ‘assured success’: ‘assured…success’ M[1TB]; 83 ‘in complete glory’: ‘in…complete glory’ N[Str]; 109 ‘heart and hands’: ‘heart and hand’ M[E2]; 113 ‘rites of love’ S[R3]; 121 ‘keeps no mean’: ‘keep the mean’ N[SLW]; 123 ‘shrewd tempters’: ‘shrewd temptation’ P[E1]; 123 ‘with their tongues’: ‘with their tongue’ N[SLW]; 127 ‘last gasp’ N[Str]; 131 ‘Saint Martin’s’: ‘Saint Martin’ N[Len]; 131‘halcyon days’ : ‘such halcyons’ N[Len]; 132 ‘these wars’ S[R2]; 135 ‘broad-spreading’ S[R2].
30 hits: Greene 2 (6.7%); Marlowe 6 (20.0%); Nashe 12 (40.0%); Peele 2 (6.7%); Shakespeare 8 (26.7%).
Act 1, scene 3 (89 lines): 7 ‘Whoe’er he be’ P[AP]; 12 ‘There’s none…but I’: ‘There’s none but I’ M[DF]; 15 ‘What traitors have we here’: ‘What traitor have we there’ M[E2]; 23 ‘haughty prelate’ S[R3]; 30 ‘dost thou command’: ‘do’est thou command’ P[E1]; 33 ‘manifest conspirator’: ‘manifest conspiracy’ N[Unf]; 37 ‘in this thy’ M[1TB]; 38 ‘I will not budge’ S[Rom]; 39 ‘cursed Cain’: ‘curse like Cain’ M[Jew]; 44 ‘Do what thou dar’st’ G[J4]; 52 ‘before the pope’ M[DF]; 55 ‘chase hence’: ‘chase us hence’ P[Alc]; 88 ‘For I intend’ N[SLW]; 89 ‘the coast cleared’: ‘the coast is clear’ N[CV]; 89 ‘not once in’ N[PP].
15 hits: Greene 1 (6.7%); Marlowe 5 (33.3%); Nashe 4 (26.7%); Peele 3 (20.0%); Shakespeare 2 (13.3%).
Act 1, scene 4 (110 lines): 1 ‘thou know’st how’ S[TGV]; 3 ‘shot at them’: ‘shoot at them’ M[MP]; 4 ‘I missed my aim’: ‘I miss my aim’ M[E2]; 12 ‘discover how’ S[Err]; 12 ‘most advantage’ M[Jew]; 13 ‘They may vex’: ‘That…may vex’ M[2TB]; 13 ‘with shot’ M[2TB; 21‘never trouble’ S[Rom]; 24 ‘by what means’ M[Did]; 24 ‘to be released’ N[Unf]; 32 ‘Rather than I would’ G[ALG]; 33 ‘as I desired’ G[J4]; 41 ‘the terror of the French’ N[PP]; 44 ‘digged
305
stones’: ‘Digging…for stones’ N[CV]; 47 ‘None durst come near’ N[Unf]; 47 ‘sudden death’ M[Jew]; ‘In iron walls’: ‘in an iron wall’ G[Sel]; 52 ‘guard of chosen’: ‘chosen guard’ P[Alc]; 54 ‘out of my bed’ N[Unf]; 56 ‘grieve to hear’ G[J4]; 56 ‘torments you endured’: ‘endure these torments’ M[DF]; 58 ‘supper-time’ S[Err]; 61 ‘sight will…delight’: ‘sight doth delight’ M[DF]; 67 ‘For aught I see’ S[Shr]; 69 ‘Lord have mercy on us’ N[SLW]; 70 ‘Lord have mercy on me’ G[FBB]; 70 ‘woeful man’ P[AP]; 73 ‘How far’st thou’: ‘how farest thou’ G[FBB]; 75 ‘accursed…hand’: ‘accursed hand’ M[E2]; 75 ‘fatal hand’ S[R2]; 78 ‘trained to the wars’: ‘trained to the war’ M[2TB]; 79 ‘Whil’st any trump did sound’: ‘while the trumpets sound’ G[ALG]; 82 ‘to look to heaven’ M[DF]; 88 ‘Bear hence his body’: ‘Bear hence this body’ S[Rom]; 91 ‘smiles on me’ G[ALG]; 95 ‘Play on the lute’: ‘lutes…playing’ N[Unf]; 97 ‘What stir is this’ S[TGV]; 99 ‘My lord, my lord’ S[R3]; 103 ‘Hear, hear’ M[Did]; 107 ‘horse’s heels’: ‘horse heels’ G[J4].
40 hits: Greene 9 (22.5%); Marlowe 13 (32.5%); Nashe 7 (17.5%); Peele 2 (5.0%); Shakespeare 9 (22.5%).
Act 1, scene 5 (39 lines): 5 ‘devil’s dam’ S[Shr]; 9 ‘can you suffer’ M[TB1]; 9 ‘hell…to prevail’: ‘hell cannot prevail’ N[PP]; 17 ‘make…testament’: ‘make…testament’ N[SLW]; 19 ‘thoughts are whirled’: ‘whirl him in a thought’ N[Len]; 20 ‘I know not where’ G[Orl]; 33 ‘It will not be!’ P[E1]; 38 ‘O would I were’ M[Did].
8 hits: Greene 1 (12.5%); Marlowe 2 (25%); Nashe 3 (37.5%); Peele 1 (12.5%); Shakespeare 1 (12.5%).
Act 1, scene 6 (31 lines): 13 ‘in the open streets’: ‘in her open streets’ G[ALG]; ‘celebrate the joy’: ‘celebrate…joy’ G[Alp]; 15 ‘mirth and joy’ G[Alp]; 16 ‘When they shall’ S[R2]; 18 ‘I will divide’ P[OWT]; ‘priests and friars’: ‘friars and priests’ M[MP]; 20 ‘in procession’
306
N[Unf]; 24 ‘Her ashes’ M[Did]; 26 ‘high festivals’: ‘at high days and solemn festivals’ N[SLW]; 28 ‘Saint Denis’ N[Len].
10 hits: Greene 3 (30.0%); Marlowe 2 (20.0%); Nashe 3 (30.0%); Peele 1 (10.0%); Shakespeare 1 (10.0%).
Act 2 scene 1 (81 lines): 1 ‘take your places’ N[Unf], 1 ‘be vigilant’ N[Len]; 3 ‘near to the walls’: ‘nearer to the walls’ G[JB]; 4 ‘court of guard’ G[Orl]; 11 ‘happy night’: ‘happy nights’ S[Rom]; 12 ‘caroused and banqueted’: ‘banquet and carouse’ M[1TB]; 13 ‘this opportunity’ N[Unf]; 15 ‘Contrived by art’: ‘by their art…can contrive’ N[PP]; 22 ‘Pray God she prove’: ‘Pray God…I prove’ S[R3]; 25 ‘Well, let them’ S[R3]; 28 ‘we will follow thee’ M[1TB]; 30 ‘make our entrance’: ‘make an entrance’ G[J4]; 31 ‘if it chance’ M[E2]; 32 ‘rise against’ G[Sel]; 43 ‘since first I’ G[Alp]; 47 ‘heavens sure favour’: ‘favoured of the heavens’ G[J4]; 48 ‘Here cometh’ P[DB]; 48 ‘I marvel how’ N[PP]; 51 ‘flatter us withal’: ‘flattered them withal’ S[Shr]; 59 ‘mischief…fallen’: ‘mischief fall’ G[FBB]; 60 ‘your default’ S[Err]; 67 ‘And for myself’ P[AP]; 67 ‘most part of’ N[Unf]; 71 ‘how or which way’ S[R2]; 76 ‘scattered and dispersed’: ‘dispersed and scattered’ S[R3]; 77 ‘lay…platforms’ (as in ‘schemes’): ‘have a platform laid’ G[Sel]; 78 ‘I’ll be so bold’: S[TGV].
27 hits: Greene 8 (29.6%); Marlowe 3 (11.1%), Nashe 6 (22.2%); Peele 2 (7.4%); Shakespeare 8 (29.6%).
Act 2, scene 2 (60 lines): 1 ‘begins to break’ G[Sel]; 3 ‘sound retreat’ M[E2]; 3 ‘cease…pursuit’: ‘ceased…pursuit’ G[Alp]; 5 ‘here advance’ P[Alc]; 6 ‘cursed town’ M[2TB]; 7 ‘paid my vow’: ‘will I pay my vows’ G[ALG]; ‘bloody massacre’: ‘bloody massacres’ G[Alp]; 19 ‘we met not’: ‘we meet not’ P[AP]; 25 ‘leap o’er’: ‘leap over’ N[Len]; 26 ‘well discern’ G[Orl]; 32 ‘set in order’ N[Unf]; 34 ‘princely train’: ‘princely trains’ P[HG]; 36 ‘realm
307
of France’ M[DF]; 38 ‘virtuous lady’: ‘virtuous…lady’ S[Err]; 39 ‘With modesty’ S[Shr]; 43 ‘Whose glory’ P[Alc]; 46 ‘ladies crave’: ‘lady crave’ P[E1]; 48 ‘Ne’er trust me then’: ‘Then never trust me’ S[Shr]; 48 ‘world of men’ S[R3]; 52 ‘in submission’ S[R3]; 55 ‘I have heard it said’ M[DF]; 59 ‘perceive my mind’ P[Alc].
21 hits: Greene 5 (22.7%); Marlowe 3 (18.2%); Nashe 2 (9.1%); Peele 6 (27.3%); Shakespeare 5 (22.7%).
Act 2, scene 3 (81 lines): 4 ‘The plot is laid’ M[1TB]; 4 ‘if all things fall out right’: ‘if all things sort out’ M[E2]; 10 ‘give their censure’: ‘give your censures’ S[R3]; 11 ‘according as your ladyship desired’: ‘according as you desire’ N[Len]; 16 ‘with his name’ M[Did]; 20 ‘strong-knit limbs’: ‘joints so strongly knit’ M[1TB]; 23 ‘strike such terror’ G[Alp]; 24 ‘I have been bold’ N[PP]; 27 ‘whither he goes’ S[R2]; 32 ‘then art thou’ G[FBB]; 34 ‘And for that cause’ M[2TB]; 36 ‘in my gallery’ M[Jew]; 39 ‘these many years’ N[Unf]; ‘Wasted our country’: ‘country wasted’ M[1TB]; 43 ‘Laughest thou’: ‘Why laugh’st thou’ M[Jew]; 44 ‘I laugh to see’ G[FBB]; 59 ‘show you presently’: ‘show it presently’ G[Alp]; 67 ‘fame hath bruited’: ‘bruited far by fame’ P[War]; 72 ‘Be not dismayed’ G[J4].
19 hits: Greene 5 (26.3%); Marlowe 8 (42.1%); Nashe 3 (15.8%); Peele 1 (5.3%); Shakespeare 2 (10.5%).
Act 2, scene 4 (133 lines): 1 ‘Lords and gentlemen’ S[R3]; 1 ‘what means this silence’: ‘what meant this wilful silence’ S[R3]; 2 ‘Dare no man…’: ‘I dare no longer…’ S[Rom]; 3 ‘Within the Temple’: ‘Within your temples’ G[ALG]; 4 ‘more convenient’ G[Alp]; 5 ‘Then say at once’ S[R3]; 9 ‘frame the law unto my will’: ‘make their wills their law’ S[TGV]; 12 ‘deeper mouth’: ‘deep-mouthed’ S[Shr]; 13 ‘better temper’: ‘better temper’d’ S[Rom]; 15 ‘merriest eye’: ‘merry eyes’ S[R3]; 18 ‘Good faith’ S[R3]; 22 ‘so well apparelled’ S[Shr]; 25 ‘tongue-tied’ S[R3]; 27 ‘true-born gentleman’: ‘true-born Englishman’ S[R2];
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28 ‘stands upon the honour’: ‘stands upon his honour’ N[PP]; 28 ‘honour of his birth’: ‘honour of thy birth’ P[Alc]; ‘dare maintain’ P[PC]; 35 ‘base insinuating’ N[SLW]; 39 ‘lords and gentlemen’ S[R3]; 47 ‘pale and maiden’: ‘maid-pale’ S[R2]; 48 ‘Giving my verdict’: ‘given their verdict’ S[R3]; 49 ‘Prick not your finger’: ‘pricked from the…finger’ S[Rom]; 58 ‘In sign whereof’ S[Shr]; 63–4 ‘witnessing/ The truth’: ‘Witness…truth’ S[TGV]; 66 ‘pure shame’ S[VA]; 70 ‘sharp and piercing’: ‘make them sharp And pierce’ S[R3]; 71 ‘canker eats’: ‘canker that eats’ S[VA]; 76 ‘peevish boy’ S[R3]; 77 ‘Turn not’ (command) N[Str]; 77 ‘thy scorns’ S[R3]; 85 ‘Spring…from so deep a root’: ‘springing from one root’ S[R2]; 88 ‘By him that made’ M[2TB]; 97 ‘Condemned…for treason’: ‘condemned of treason’ S[VA]; 101 ‘book of memory’: ‘books of memory’ P[PC]; 104 ‘thou shalt find us ready’: ‘me you shall find ready’ S[Shr]; 110 ‘it [rose] wither’: ‘rose wither’ S[R2]; 111 ‘height of my degree’: ‘height of his degree’ S[R3]; 115 ‘must perforce’ S[R3]; 120 ‘I will not live’ M[MP]; 123 ‘upon thy party’: ‘upon his party’ S[R3]; 127 ‘death and deadly’ M[1TB]; 130 ‘In your behalf’ S[R3]; 133 ‘drink blood’: ‘drinks our blood’ S[Rom].
43 hits: Greene 2 (4.7%); Marlowe 3 (7.0%); Nashe 3 (7.0%); Peele 3 (7.0%); Shakespeare 32 (74.4%).
Act 2, scene 5 (129 lines): 4 ‘long imprisonment’ N[PP]; 8 ‘eyes, like lamps whose wasting oil is spent’: ‘his eyes…two lamps burnt out in darkness’ S[VA]; 9 ‘Wax dim’: ‘waxen dim’ P[War]; 14 ‘lump of clay’ M[Jew]; 19 ‘unto his chamber’: ‘unto my chamber’ S[TGV]; 22 ‘Poor gentleman’ S[R3]; 29 ‘men’s miseries’ G[Sel]; 30 ‘dismiss me hence’: ‘dismiss thee hence’ P[AP]; 33 ‘now is come’ M[DF]; 35 ‘noble uncle’ S[R2]; 37 ‘embrace his neck’ G[ALG]; 38 ‘And in his bosom’ P[DB]; 38 ‘latter gasp’ M[Did]; 39 ‘touch his cheeks’: ‘touch that cheek’ S[Rom]; 44 ‘ease…disease’: ‘disease…to ease’ N[SLW]; 46 ‘Some words there’ S[Rom]; 46 ‘grew ’twixt’: ‘grows ’twixt’ P[AP]; 47 ‘lavish tongue’: ‘lavish tongues’ M[1TB]; 52 ‘true Plantagenet’ G[FBB]; 53 ‘declare the cause’ M[1TB]; 56 ‘flow’ring youth’: ‘flower of my youth’ N[SLW]; 59 ‘more at large’ N[Str]; 63
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‘grandfather to this king’: ‘grandfather to him that now reigneth’ G[Sel]; 70 ‘reason moved’: ‘reason that moved’ N[Unf]; 70 ‘warlike lords’ P[Alc]; 72 ‘begotten of his body’: ‘of your body…begotten’ N[Unf]; 80 ‘rightful heir’ G[Sel]; 89 ‘installed me in the diadem’: ‘invest…in the diadem’ G[Sel]; 97 ‘studious care’: ‘study and care’ N[Str]; 99 ‘But yet methinks’ M[2TB]; 100 ‘bloody tyranny’: ‘tyrannous and bloody’ S[R3]; 101 ‘With silence’ S[R2]; 101 ‘be thou politic’: ‘be…wise and politic’ P[DB]; 103 ‘like a mountain’ M[E2]; 104 ‘removing hence’: ‘remove you hence’ S[Shr]; 111 ‘Mourn not’ P[DB]; 112 ‘give order for my funeral’: ‘give order for his burial’ [R3]; 118 ‘I will lock [in breast]’ M[Did].
38 hits: Greene 6 (15.8%); Marlowe 8 (21.1%); Nashe 7 (18.4%); Peele 7 (18.4%); Shakespeare 10 (26.3%).
Act 3, scene 1 (200 lines): 1 ‘Com’st thou’ S[R2]; 4 ‘lay unto my charge’: ‘lay unto the…charge’ S[R3]; 6 ‘As I with’ G[J4]; 7 ‘what thou canst’ S[Shr]; 8 ‘Presumptuous priest’: ‘Presumptuous friar’ G[FBB]; 11 ‘vile outrageous’ M[1TB]; 13 ‘rehearse the method’: ‘rehearse…the method’ N[Str]; 19 ‘Lascivious, wanton’: ‘wanton and lascivious’ M[DF]; 24 ‘thoughts were sifted’: ‘thoughts…sifted’ N[PP]; 26 ‘envious malice of thy swelling heart’: ‘malice of his envious heart’ M[MP] 27 ‘I do defy’ S[Rom]; 27–8 ‘vouchsafe to give me hearing’: ‘vouchsafe to hear’ P[E1]; 50 ‘not thy life’ M[Jew]; 54 ‘Methinks my lord’ M[MP]; 58 ‘touched so near’: ‘touch me near’ S[TGV]; 64 'have a fling at' G[Sel]; 66 'English weal': 'England's weal' P[E1]; 68 'join your hearts': 'joined my heart' S[Rom]; 72 'Civil dissension' N[PP]; 72–3 'worm That gnaws': 'gnawing worm' N[Unf]; 79 'carry any weapon': 'carrying weapons' N[Unf]; 81 'banding themselves': 'band themselves' G[Sel]; 83 'giddy brains': 'giddy brain' M[E2]; 84 'in every street' N[SLW]; 87 'slaught'ring hands': 'slaughtering hand' P[War]; 89 ‘fall to it’ G[J4]; 91 ‘Do what ye dare’: ‘do what thou dar’st’ G[J4]; 95 ‘Just and upright’ S[R2]; 96 ‘Inferior to none’ S[Shr]; 99 ‘inkhorn’ N[SLW]; 103 ‘when we are dead’ G[Sel]; 105 ‘forbear a while’ S[TGV]; 106 ‘afflict my soul’: ‘afflicts my soul’ M[2TB]; ‘mischief…murder’: ‘murder, mischief’ M[MP]; 118
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‘will never yield’ M[Jew]; 119 ‘Compassion on’ G[ALG]; 121 ‘get that privilege’: ‘get a privilege’ N[PP]; 123 ‘moody-discontented’ S[R3]; 124 ‘it doth appear’ S[Err]; 129 ‘thing you teach’: ‘teach many things’ N[AM]; 136 ‘but I fear me’ M[DF]; 136 ‘hollow heart’: ‘hollow-hearted’ S[R3]; 138 ‘flag of truce’: ‘flags of truce’ M[2TB]; 140 ‘So help me God’ G[Sel]; 148 ‘most gracious’ S[R3]; 152 ‘every circumstance’ G[J4]; 153 ‘You have…reason’ P[AP]; 157 ‘our pleasure is’ P[E1]; 160 ‘wrongs be recompensed’: ‘recompense the wrong’ G[Alp]; 163 ‘all the whole’ N[SLW]; 164 ‘belong unto’: ‘belongs unto’ M[Did]; 166 ‘humble servant’ G[Sel]; 166 ‘vows obedience’: ‘vow obedience’ G[FBB]; 167 ‘point of death’ S[Rom]; 169 ‘duty done’ P[Ang]; 171 ‘true Plantagenet’ G[FBB]; 179 ‘to be crowned’ S[R3]; 181 ‘loyal friends’: ‘loyal friend’ G[Sel]; 189 ‘feigned…of forged’: ‘feign to forge’ G[FBB]; 191 ‘festered members’: ‘festered joint’ S[R2]; 194 ‘now I fear’ S[Shr]; 196 ‘sucking babe’: ‘sucking infant’ G[ALG]; 200 ‘hapless time’: ‘hapless hour’ G[Sel].
63 hits: Greene 18 (28.6%); Marlowe 12 (19.0%); Nashe 10 (15.9%); Peele 6 (9.5%). Shakespeare 17 (27.0%)
Act 3, scene 2 (137 lines): 1 ‘city gates’: ‘city gate’ S[TGV]; 2 ‘make a breach’: ‘make the breech’ P[E1]; 3 ‘be wary’ S[Rom]; 4 ‘vulgar sort’ N[PP]; 8 ‘to our friends’ M[2TB]; 18 ‘Saint Denis’ N[Len]; 20 ‘Here entered’: ‘here entered’[into bond] S[Err]; 21 ‘Now she is’ S[TGV]; 31 ‘shine it like a comet of revenge’: ‘shines as comets menacing revenge’ M[1TB]; 33 ‘Defer no time’: ‘Defer not time’ G[ALG]; 33 ‘delays have dangerous ends’: ‘Delay is dangerous’ G[Alp]; 49 ‘revenge this treason’ M[Did]; 50 ‘What will you do’ M[DF]; 52 ‘Foul fiend’: ‘foul fiends’ S[VA]; 55 ‘twit with cowardice’: ‘twits…with his cowardice’ P[War]; ‘Who shall be’ M[Jew]; 61 ‘meet us in’ M[MP]; 68 ‘muleteers…foot-boys’: ‘muleteers, Horse-boys’ P[Alc]; 69 ‘foot-boys’: ‘foot-boy’ S[Shr]; 70 ‘take up arms’ M[Jew]; ‘like gentlemen’ M[1TB]; 72 ‘means no goodness’: ‘mean no good’ S[R3]; 77 ‘honour of thy house’ P[Alc]; 79 ‘Either…or die’ P[E1]; 90 ‘do not so dishonour me’: ‘do not this dishonour to thy love’ P[DB]; 91 ‘Here will I sit’ G[ALG]; 96 ‘vanquished
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his foes’: ‘vanquish all our foes’ G[Alp]; 99 ‘Undaunted spirit’ M[E2]; 100 ‘Then be it so’ S[R3]; 110 ‘quiet soul’ S[R3]; 114 ‘fain by flight to save themselves’: ‘Is fain to put his safety in swift flight’ G[Sel]; 119 ‘Enshrines thee in his heart’: ‘enshrine Edward…secret in her heart’ G[FBB]; 124 ‘hangs her head in grief’: ‘droop with grief and hang thy head’ S[VA]; 128 ‘And then depart’ M[2TB]; 129 ‘with his nobles’ G[ALG]; 136 ‘kings and…potentates’: ‘kings and potentates’ G[ALG].
36 hits: Greene 8 (22.2%); Marlowe 10 (27.8%); Nashe 2 (5.6%); Peele 6 (16.7%); Shakespeare 10 (27.8%).
Act 3, scene 3 (91 lines): 5 ‘triumph for a while’: ‘triumph a while’ N[Unf]; 7 ‘pull his plumes’: ‘pull my plumes’ M[1TB]; 12 ‘Search out’ G[ALG]; 13 ‘famous through the world’ M[1TB]; 14 ‘set thy statue’: ‘set up her stature’ M[2TB]; 15 ‘blessed saint’ N[CV]; 16 ‘sweet virgin’: ‘sweet virgins’ M[1TB]; 20 ‘to follow us’ S[R3]; 27–8 ‘work To bring’: ‘work…to bring’ M[MP]; 31 ‘There goes the’ N[Str]; 31 ‘colours spread’ M[1TB]; 39 ‘What say’st thou’ S[R3]; 40 ‘enchant him with thy words’: ‘with his words he ’gan their wits enchant’ P[War]; 43 ‘Speak on’ G[J4]; 44 ‘Look on thy’ G[ALG]; 46 ‘cruel foe’ G[Sel]; 47 ‘As looks the’ M[1TB]; 50 ‘Behold the wounds’; ‘Behold her wounded’ M[1TB] 56 ‘flood of tears’ S[Err]; 64 ‘set footing’ S[R2]; 65 ‘fashioned thee’ S[R2]; 76 ‘return; return’ S[TGV]; 79 ‘roaring cannon-shot’ G[Alp]; 83 ‘power of men’ M[MP]; 89 ‘coronet of gold’: ‘coronet of…gold’ G[FBB]; 90 ‘join our powers’: ‘join their powers’ G[Alp].
26 hits: Greene 7 (26.9%); Marlowe 9 (34.6%); Nashe 3 (11.5%); Peele 1 (3.8%); Shakespeare 6 (22.2%).
Act 3, scene 4 (45 lines): 1 ‘gracious prince’ S[R3]; 3 ‘have awhile’: ‘had awhile’ N[Len]; 3 ‘given truce’: ‘give truce’ G[ALG]; 5 ‘In sign whereof’ S[Shr]; 11 ‘the glory of his conquest’: ‘the glory of the conquest’ P[DB]; 16 ‘brave captain’: ‘brave captains’ P[DB]; 17 ‘I am not old’
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M[Did]; 18 ‘how my father’ S[TGV]; 19 ‘stouter champion’: ‘stout champions’ P[DB]; 21 ‘faithful service’ S[R2]; 31 ‘Dar’st thou maintain’: ‘dare thee…to maintain’ G[FBB]; 31 ‘thou spak’st’ S[R2].
12 hits: Greene 2 (16.7%); Marlowe 1 (8.3%); Nashe 1 (8.3%); Peele 3 (25.0%); Shakespeare 5 (41.7%).
Act 4, scene 1 (194 lines): 1 ‘crown upon his head’: ‘crown upon her head’ M[DF]; 4 ‘no other king’ M[E2]; 5 ‘such as are’ M[1TB]; 7 ‘Malicious practices’: ‘malicious practice’ N[Unf]; 8 ‘righteous God’ P[DB]; 11 ‘to my hands’ M[2TB]; 22 ‘Before we met’ [an army]: ‘Before we meet’ [ an army] M[2TB]; 25 ‘divers gentlemen’: ‘divers…gentlemen’ N[Unf]; 30 ‘To say the truth’ S[R3]; 31 ‘ill beseeming’ S[Rom]; 33 ‘When first this’ G[Sel]; 34 ‘Knights of the Garter’ P[HG]; 40 ‘usurp the…name’: ‘usurps the…name’ M[1TB]; 41 ‘honourable order’ P[HG]; 42 ‘to be judge’ P[AP]; 43 ‘Be…degraded’: ‘being degraded’ M[Jew]; 46 ‘thou that wast’ S[R3]; 50 ‘What means his grace’: ‘what means your grace’ M[E2]; 56 ‘country’s wrack’ P[E1]; 59 ‘monstrous treachery’ M[E2]; 63 ‘false dissembling’ M[Did]; 69 ‘give him chastisement’ S[R2]; 73 ‘gather strength’ M[1TB]; 74 ‘Let him perceive’: ‘let thee perceive’ N[Unf]; 74 ‘ill we brook’: ‘brook it ill’ S[R3]; 77 ‘You may behold’ P[Alc]; 88 ‘First let me know’ G[Orl]; 97 ‘vile and ignominious’ M[2TB]; 103 ‘set a gloss upon’: ‘set gloss on’ S[VA]; 104 ‘I was provoked’ S[R3]; 108 ‘Will…be left’: ‘will be left’ S[Err]; 109 ‘private grudge’: ‘privy grudge’ G[J4]; 115 ‘Quiet yourselves’ N[Str]; 118 ‘The quarrel toucheth none’ G[Sel]; 130 ‘Much less to’ G[ALG]; 136 ‘Quite to forget’: ‘quite forget’ G[ALG]; 136 ‘quarrel and the cause’ M[E2]; 139 ‘in our looks’ G[Sel]; 144 ‘princes shall be certified’: ‘That certified the princes’ G[Sel]; 150 ‘bought with blood’ M[Jew]; 155 ‘Both are my kinsmen’ S[R2]; 161 ‘So let us’ P[OWT]; 161 ‘peace and love’ P[DB]; 163 ‘in these parts’ N[Unf]; 179 ‘thought no harm’: ‘think no harm’ S[R3]; 184 ‘I fear we’ S[R3]; 186 ‘imagined or supposed’: ‘imagine or suppose’ N[Len]; 187 ‘But howsoe’er’: ‘But howsoever’ G[Sel]; 187 ‘simple man’: ‘simple man’s’ N[PP]; 192 ‘’Tis much’ S[VA]; 194 ‘There comes’ M[Jew].
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51 hits: Greene 9 (17.6%) Marlowe 15 (27.4%); Nashe 7 (13.7%); Peele 8 (15.7%); Shakespeare 12 (23.5%).
Act 4, scene 2 (56 lines): 7 ‘obedient subjects’ S[R3]; 15 ‘owl of death’: ‘owls, nothing but songs of death’ S[R3]; 19 ‘well fortified’ M[Jew]; 20 ‘strong enough’ M[E2]; 22 ‘snares of war to tangle thee’: ‘tangled in a dangerous war’ P[Alc]; 23 ‘On either hand’ S[Shr]; 28 ‘ta’en the sacrament’ S[R2]; 30 ‘Christian soul’ S[R3]; 34 ‘That I, thy’ G[Alp]; 39 ‘warning-bell’ G[ALG]; 45–6 ‘parked and bounded in a pale [like] deer’: ‘Within the circuit of this ivory pale/ I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer’ S[VA]; 48 ‘If we be’ S[R3]; 52 ‘make the cowards stand aloof: ‘make a coward fight’ P[Alc]; 52 ‘stand aloof’ S[Rom]; 54 ‘And they shall find’ N[Len]; 55 ‘God and Saint George’ S[R3]; 56 ‘dangerous fight’ G[J4].
17 hits: Greene 3 (17.6%); Marlowe 2 (11.8%); Nashe 1 (5.9%); Peele 2 (11.8%); Shakespeare 9 (52.9%).
Act 4, scene 3 (53 lines): 2 ‘mighty army’ M[1TB]; 3 ‘give it out’ N[Len]; 4 ‘with his power’ S[R2]; 12 ‘expect my aid’: ‘expecting but the aid’ S[R3]; 23 ‘Else farewell’ G[ALG]; 25 ‘Doth stop my’ P[E1]; 26 ‘So should we’ S[R3]; 28 ‘wrathful fury’ M[E2]; 30 ‘distressed lord’ P[Alc]; 36 ‘in travel toward’: ‘traveling towards’ S[R2]; 38 ‘both their lives’ M[Jew]; 42 ‘sundered friends’ S[R3]; 42 ‘the hour of death’ S[R3]; 50 ‘conquest of our…conqueror’: ‘conquest of his conqueror’ S[R3].
14 hits: Greene 1 (7.1%); Marlowe 3 (21.4%); Nashe 1 (7.1%); Peele 2 (14.3%); Shakespeare 7 (50.0%).
Act 4, scene 4 (46 lines):
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1 ‘It is too late’ N[Str]; 3 ‘Too rashly’ N[SLW]; 5 ‘over-daring’ M[E2]; 7 ‘desperate…adventure’: ‘desperate adventures’ S[R3]’; 19–20 ‘lingering…false hopes’: ‘false hopes linger’ S[R2]; 30 ‘upon…exclaims’: ‘exclaiming upon’ N[Str]; 40 ‘I will dispatch…straight’: ‘I will dispatch it straight’ S[R3]; 42 ‘Too late comes’ S[R2]; 42 ‘ta’en or slain’ S[R2]; 45 ‘If he be dead’ S[VA].
10 hits: Greene 0; Marlowe 1 (10.0%); Nashe 3 (30.0%); Peele 0; Shakespeare 6 (60.0%).
Act 4, scene 5 (55 lines): 7 ‘thou art come’ G[Orl]; 8 ‘unavoided danger’ S[R2]; 9 ‘mount on…horse’: ‘mount thee upon his horse’ S[R2]; 11 ‘sudden flight’ G[Sel]; 11 ‘dally not’ S[Err]; 13 ‘shall I fly?’ G[Alp]; 15 ‘To make a bastard and a slave of me’: ‘To make a bondmaid and a slave of me’ S[Shr]; 20 ‘sure to die’ G[Alp]; 23 ‘My worth’ M[E2]; 26 ‘you have won’ M[2TB]; 28 ‘You fled’ S[Err]; 31 ‘the first hour’ N[Unf]; 36 ‘I command thee’: ‘I commanded thee’ G[Alp]; 38 ‘Part of thy’ P[DB]; 38 ‘may be saved’ M[DF]; 48 ‘No more can I’ N[Len]; 55 ‘this afternoon’ S[Rom].
17 hits: Greene 5 (29.4%); Marlowe 3 (17.6%); Nashe 2 (11.8%); Peele 1 (5.9%); Shakespeare 6 (35.3%).
Act 4, scene 6 (57 lines): 1 ‘Saint George and victory’: ‘Saint George…and victory’ S[R3]; 8 ‘warlike sword’: ‘warlike swords’ G[Alp]; 10 ‘sword struck fire’: ‘sword stroke fire’ M[TB1]; 12 ‘boldfaced’ S[VA]; 17–18 ‘the maidenhood/ Of thy first fight’: ‘have the maidenhead of his chivalry’ N[Unf]; 24 ‘brave boy’ P[Alc]; 30 ‘revenge my death’ M[MP]; 33 ‘all our lives’ M[Did]; 37 ‘the short’ning of my life’: ‘short’ning my days’ M[DF]; 40 ‘by thy stay’ S[Rom]; 43 ‘These words of yours’ G[ALG]; 47 ‘coward horse’: ‘horse…cowardlike’ P[Ang]; 47 ‘fall and die’ M[E2]; 49 ‘subject of mischance’: ‘subject to…mischances’ S[VA]; 52 ‘it is no boot’ S[Shr].
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15 hits: Greene 2 (13.3%); Marlowe 5 (33.3%); Nashe 1 (6.7%); Peele 2 (13.3%); Shakespeare 5 (33.3%).
Act 4, scene 7 (96 lines): 4 ‘makes me smile’: ‘make me smile’ S[R3]; 5 ‘When he perceived’: ‘When he perceived’ N[Unf]; 6 ‘His bloody sword’: ‘his bloody sword’ G[Sel]; 6 ‘brandished [sword] over’: ‘brandish [sword] over’ S[R2]; 7 ‘hungry lion’ S[TGV]; 8 ‘Rough…and stern’: ‘rough and stern’ N[SLW]; 8 ‘rage…impatience’: ‘impatiently doth rage’ S[TGV]; 9 ‘stood alone’: ‘stand alone’ S[Rom]; 12 ‘from my side’ S[R2]; 14 ‘sea of blood’ M[2TB]; 17’my dear lord’ S[R2]; 18 ‘antic death’: ‘Death…the antic’ S[R2]; 19 ‘insulting tyranny’ S[R3]; 23 ‘O thou whose’ S[R3]; 23 ‘hard-favoured Death’: ‘death/ Hard-favoured’ S[VA]; 24 ‘yield thy breath’ S[R3]; 27 ‘Poor boy’ S[R2]; 29 ‘father’s arms’ M[1TB]; 34 ‘should have found’ S[R2]; 34 ‘bloody day’ P[Alc]; 40–1 ‘was not born to’ S[Rom]; 44 ‘noble knight’ G[J4]; 48 ‘England’s glory’ P[E1]; 53 ‘art thou sent?’ G[Orl]; 55 ‘what it means’ N[SLW]; 56 ‘I come to know what’ P[E1]; 56 ‘thou hast ta’en’ P[E1]; 61 ‘Valiant Lord’: ‘Valiant Lords’ P[Alc]; 68 ‘the noble order of Saint George’: ‘noble order sacred to Saint George’ P[HG]; 69 ‘Saint Michael’ N[Len]; 73 ‘two-and-fifty’ S[Shr]; 75 ‘with all these’ S[Rom]; 76 ‘fly-blown’ N[PP]; 80 ‘That I in’ P[E1]; 82 ‘realm of France’ M[DF]; 83 ‘Were but his’ N[SLW]; 86 ‘give them burial’ S[R2]; 86 ‘as beseems their worth’: ‘as beseems their state’ P[E1]; 88 ‘such a proud’ G[JB]; 89 ‘let him have him’ M[DF]; 93 ‘that shall make’ S[Rom]; 96 ‘All will be’ S[R3].
42 hits: Greene 4 (9.5%); Marlowe 4 (9.5%); Nashe 6 (14.3%); Peele 8 (19.0%); Shakespeare 20 (47.6%).
Act 5, scene 1 (62 lines): 4 ‘humbly sue’: ‘humbly sues’ S[R3]; 5 ‘peace concluded’ N[Unf]; 9 ‘effusion of…blood’: ‘effusion of blood’ M[E2]; 9 ‘Christian blood’ M[1TB]; 10 ‘on every side’
316
S[R3]; 14 ‘one faith’ N[PP]; 27 ‘country’s weal’ M[2TB]; 34 ‘My lords ambassadors’: ‘my lord ambassador’ P[Alc]; 36 ‘both good and’ S[Shr]; 37 ‘And therefore are we’ M[Jew]; 39 ‘Which by my’ S[R3]; 44 ‘of her dower’: ‘of her dowry’ P[E1]; 54 ‘grave ornaments’: ‘grave…ornaments’ S[Rom]; 55 ‘upon your lordship’s’: ‘upon your lordship’ S[R3]; 57 ‘proudest peer’ M[E2].
15 hits: Greene 0 (0.0%); Marlowe 5 (33.3%); Nashe 2 (13.3%); Peele 2 (13.3%); Shakespeare 6 (40.0%).
Act 5, scene 2 (21 lines): 1 ‘cheer our drooping’: ‘cheer thy drooping’ M[Did]; 12 ‘conjoined in one’ M[Did]; 13 ‘means to give’: ‘meant to give’ M[1TB]; 13 ‘give you battle’: ‘give…battle’ M[E2].
4 hits: Marlowe 4 (100.0%).
Act 5, scene 3 (195 lines): 2 ‘Now help’ G[J4]; 7 ‘aid me in this enterprise’ M[DF]; 10 ‘familiar spirits’: ‘familiar spirit’ M[DF]; 11 ‘regions under earth’: ‘region under earth’ M[2TB]; 13 ‘hold me not’ S[Rom]; 14 ‘Where I was wont’ M[Jew]; 15 ‘give it you’ S[Rom]; 17 ‘So you do’ M[1TB]; 17 ‘help me now’ M[Jew]; 18 ‘My body shall’ S[R2]; 22 ‘Then take my’ G[Orl]; 32 ‘try if they can’ S[Rom]; 36 ‘thou canst not be’ N[Unf]; 39 ‘plaguing mischief’: ‘plagues and mischief’ G[FBB]; 40 ‘suddenly surprised’: ‘suddenly surprise’ M[E2]; 54 ‘Be not offended’ N[Str]; 54 ‘nature’s miracle’: ‘miracle of nature’ P[E1]; 57 ‘underneath her wings’: ‘underneath his wings’ M[MP]; 58 ‘once offend’ G[ALG]; 66 ‘pen and ink’ M[Jew]; 77 ‘Why speak’st thou not?’: ‘Why speakest thou not?’ G[Alp]; 81 ‘Fond man’ M[Did]; 81 ‘thou hast a wife’ M[DF]; 82 ‘thy paramour’ G[ALG]; 83 ‘for he will not’ N[PP]; 84 ‘all is marred’: ‘marring of all’ N[SLW]; 89 ‘for my king’ P[E1]; 94 ‘though her father be’ S[Shr]; 95 ‘yet he is’ S[R2]; 101 ‘be enthralled’ M[1TB]; 112 ‘To be a queen’ G[J4]; 115 ‘England’s royal king’ S[R3]; 119 ‘precious crown’ S[R2]; 124 ‘so fair a dame’ P[DB]; 125 ‘have no portion’ N[Str]; 130 ‘confer
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with him’ S[R3]; 132 ‘what remedy?’ M[MP]; 133 ‘I am a soldier’ G[Alp]; 136 ‘for thy honour’ P[E1]’; 136 ‘give consent’ S[Rom]; 144 ‘just demand’ G[Alp]; 145 ‘And here I will’ N[Unf]; 145 ‘expect thy coming’: ‘expects my coming’ S[TGV]; 146 ‘brave earl’: ‘brave earls’ P[HG]; 152 ‘princely bride’ P[E1]; 152 ‘such a lord’ S[R3]; 153–4 ‘quietly Enjoy’ S[Shr]; 155 ‘stroke of war’ M[1TB]; 156 ‘My daughter shall be’ M[Jew]; 156 ‘if he please’ S[Shr]; 157 ‘That is her ransom’: ‘that shall be their ransom’ N[Len]; 168 ‘marriage to be solemnised’: ‘marriage is solemnised’ G[FBB]; 170 ‘golden palaces’ M[2TB]; 170 ‘as it becomes’: ‘as it becometh’ P[HHG]; 173 ‘praise and prayers’: ‘praise and…prayers’ P[Ang]; 175 ‘sweet madam’ P[AP]; 177 ‘becomes a maid’: ‘become a maid’ G[Alp]; 180 ‘must trouble’ S[R3].
58 hits: Greene 11 (19.0%); Marlowe 16 (27.6%); Nashe 7 (12.1%); Peele 9 (15.5%); Shakespeare 15 (25.9%).
Act 5, scene 4 (175 lines): 6 ‘I’ll die with’ G[Sel]; 11 ‘all the parish’ M[DF]; 15 ‘life hath been’ G[ALG]; 25 ‘take my blessing’: ‘take our blessing’ M[DF]; 26 ‘cursèd be the time’: ‘cursed be the time’ N[Str]; 27 ‘thy nativity’ S[R3]; 32 ‘Dost thou deny’ S[Err]; 32 ‘deny thy father’ S[Rom]; 34 ‘lived too long’ P[E1]; 35 ‘First let me tell’ S[Rom]; 39 ‘Virtuous and holy’ S[R3]; 40 ‘By inspiration’ S[Err]; 44 ‘blood of innocents’ M[MP]; 47 ‘a thing impossible’ S[Shr]; 48 ‘compass wonders’: ‘wonders…compassed be’ M[DF]; 48 ‘by help of devils’: ‘by the help of devils’ G[FBB]; 51 ‘immaculate in very thought’: ‘thoughts immaculate’ S[TGV]; 58 ‘That so her’ P[DB]; 59 ‘unrelenting hearts’: ‘unrelenting…hearts’ M[Jew]; 63 ‘fruit within my womb’: ‘fruit within thy womb’ M[MP]; 73 ‘enjoyed my love’: ‘enjoy my love’ G[J4]; 77 ‘’Twas neither’ G[Alp]; 79 ‘most intolerable’ M[DF]; 80 ‘Why, here’s a girl!’: ‘Why , there’s a wench!’ S[Shr]; 83 ‘And yet, forsooth’ G[Orl]; 85 ‘for it is in vain’ N[Len]; 87 ‘never…sun reflex his beams’: ‘Nor sun reflex his…beams’ M[1TB]; 93 ‘minister of hell’ S[R3]; 96 ‘states of Christendom’: ‘state of Christendom’ N[Unf]; 101 ‘to confer about’ S[TGV]; 101 ‘some matter’: ‘some matters’ N[Str]; 102 ‘Is all our…turned to’ M[DF]; 102 ‘our travail’: ‘our travails’ M[Did]; 102 ‘to this
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effect’ N[Len]; 105 ‘That in this quarrel’: ‘That in this conflict’ G[Alp]; 106 ‘their country’s benefit’: ‘benefit of his country’ N[PP]; 108 ‘Have we not’ M[2TB]; 108 ‘most part’ N[SLW]; 109 ‘treason, falsehood’ P[E1]; 112 ‘realm of France’ M[MP]; 122 ‘By sight of’ S[R2]; 127 ‘suffer…to breathe’ P[E1]; 128 ‘true liegemen’ P[E1]; 129 ‘thou wilt swear’ S[Rom]; 130 ‘submit thyself’ G[J4]; 134 ‘Adorn his temples’: ‘Adorn thy temples’ P[Alc]; 138 ‘I am possessed’ S[Err]; 139 ‘With more than’ N[Unf]; 142 ‘Detract so much’: ‘detract so long’ G[J4]; 143 ‘As to be’ S[R2]; 144 ‘rather keep’ N[PP]; 146 ‘Be cast from’: ‘been cast from’ G[ALG]; 147 ‘by secret means’ G[Alp]; 164 ‘Although you’ S[TGV]; 168 ‘In any of’ N[PP]; 168 ‘towns of garrison’: ‘town of garrison’ N[PP]; 171 ‘be rebellious’ G[Sel]; 175 ‘For here we’ S[Rom]; 175 ‘entertain a solemn’: ‘entertained…with this solemn’ N[Unf].
59 hits: Greene: 12 (20.3%); Marlowe: 12 (20.3%); Nashe 12 (20.3%); Peele: 6 (10.2%); Shakespeare 17 (28.8%).
Act 5, scene 5 (108 lines): 9 ‘fruition of her love’: ‘fruition of her joy’ M[2TB]; 15 ‘ravish any…conceit’: ‘ravished in conceit’ G[J4]; 19 ‘content to be’ S[Shr]; 25 ‘flatter sin’: ‘flattered me in sin’ G[ALG]; 27 ‘lady of esteem’: ‘ladies of esteem’ S[Rom]; 30 ‘As doth a’ P[OWT]; 33 ‘his adversary’s’: ‘his adversary’ N[Unf]; 36 ‘more than that’ G[Alp]; 41 ‘great authority’ M[DF]; 42 ‘confirm our peace’ G[J4]; 45 ‘near kinsman’ G[J4]; 47 ‘sooner will’ G[Sel]; 48 ‘not so your’ P[AP]; 49 ‘That he should be’ N[PP]; 49 ‘abject, base’: ‘base and abject’ G[ALG]; 54 ‘oxen, sheep’ P[DB]; 58 ‘companion of his…bed’: ‘companion in thy bed’ G[J4]; 58 ‘nuptial bed’ M[E2]; 60 ‘these reasons’ M[MP]; 62 ‘what is wedlock’: ‘what wedlock is’ G[J4]; 65 ‘And is a’ G[ALG]; 66 ‘being a king’ M[E2]; 69 ‘fit for none’ N[PP]; 70 ‘valiant courage and undaunted’: ‘valiant courage could not daunted be’ G[Alp]; 71 ‘More than in’ N[Unf]; 71 ‘commonly seen’: ‘common to be seen’ P[DA]; 75 ‘high resolve’: ‘high resolved’ N[Str]; 76 ‘as is fair Margaret’ G[FBB]; 76 ‘linked in love’: ‘linked in…love’ G[FBB]; 77 ‘Then yield’ G[Orl]; 79 ‘Whether it be’ N[PP]; 83 ‘but this I am assured’ N[Unf]; 85 ‘hope and fear’ N[Len]; 87
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‘Take…shipping’: ‘Take shipping’ M[E2]; 88 ‘any covenants’: ‘any covenant’ N[Unf]; 94 ‘Be gone, I say’ M[MP]; 97 ‘what you were’ G[FBB]; 99 ‘sudden execution’: ‘sudden in the execution’ S[R3]; 100 ‘from company’ N[Len]; 102 ‘first and last’ N[Len]; 104 ‘As did the’ G[Orl]; 105 ‘With hope’ P[Alc]; 107 ‘rule the king’: ‘rule…the king’ M[E2]; 108 ‘king and realm’: ‘the realm, the king’ M[E2].
44 hits: Greene 16 (36.4%); Marlowe 9 (20.5%); Nashe 11 (25.0%); Peele 5 (11.4%); Shakespeare 3 (6.8%).
Control Tests The data recorded below are for the results of Literature Online searches for phrases that link sample passages from (1) the first hundred lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III; (2) lines 105–205 of Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament; (3) the first hundred lines of Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; (4) Lines 18–188 of Act V, scene i of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (A-text) and (5) the first hundred lines of Peele’s Edward I, with only one of the canons being searched.
1. Shakespeare Richard III I.i.1–100: 3 ‘clouds that low’r’d’: ‘louring brows…/Like misty vapours’ S[VA]; 3 ‘upon our house’: ‘upon thy house’ M[Jew]; 7 ‘merry meetings’: ‘merry meeting’ G[J4]; 12 ‘lady’s chamber’: ‘lady’s chamber-window’ S[TGV]; 20 ‘Deform’d, unfinished’: ‘shapeless and unfinished’ S[VA]; 18–20 ‘I, that am…//sent before’: ‘I am sent before’ S[Shr]; 21 ‘scarce half’ M[2TB]; 22 ‘And that so lamely’: ‘and that so sweetly’ N[Unf]; 25 ‘Have no delight’ P[DB]; 25 ‘pass away the time’ P[E1]; 27 ‘mine own deformity’: ‘my…deformities’ N[PP]; 37 ‘subtle, false’: ‘subtle…false’ S[TGV]; 37 ‘false, and treacherous’: ‘treacherous and false’ M[1TB]; 38 ‘closely be mew’d up’: ‘closely mew’d her up’ S[Shr]; 46 ‘Upon what cause’ S[Err]; 48 ‘He should for that’: ‘You should for that’ S[Err]; 50 ‘new christ’ned’ N[Unf]; 51 ‘may I know?’: ‘May I know…?’ G[FBB];
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52 ‘when I know’ M[Did]; 53 ‘I can learn’: ‘I cannot learn’ S[R2]; 62 ‘Why, this it is’ S[TGV]; 63 ‘’Tis not the king’ M[E2]; 65 ‘That tempers him to this extremity’: ‘Temp’ring extremities S[Rom]; 69 ‘From whence this’ S[R2]; 72 ‘night-walking herald’: ‘night’s herald’ S[VA]; 80 ‘wear her livery’: ‘wear your livery’ S[Rom]; 82 ‘Since that our brother’: ‘Since that our liege’ G[J4]; 84 ‘I beseech your Graces both to pardon me’: ‘I do beseech your Grace to pardon me’ S[R2]; 85 ‘given in charge’: ‘gives in charge’ M[Did]; 90 ‘We speak no treason, man’: ‘I speak no treason, Father’ S[Rom]; 92 ‘strook in years’ S[Shr]; 93 ‘We say that’ M[DF]; 94 ‘passing pleasing’ G[J4]; 96 ‘How say you, sir?’ P[OWT]; 96 ‘Can you deny all this?’: ‘Can you deny it?’ S[Err]; 99 ‘he that doth’ G[Sel]; 99 ‘excepting one’ S[R2].
37 hits: Greene 5 (13.5%); Marlowe 7 (18.9%); Nashe 3 (8.1%); Peele 3 (8.1%); Shakespeare 19 (51.4%).
2. Nashe Summer’s Last Will and Testament ll. 105–205: 108 ‘Peace, plenty’: ‘Peace…Plenty’ S[R3]; 110 ‘earth is hell’ N[SLW, 1206]; 110 ‘deckt thy garland’: ‘decked with garlands’ P[HG]; 112 ‘Upon thy grave’: ‘upon your grave’ S[Err]; 113 ‘consume your sap’: ‘sap-consuming’ S[Err]; 114 ‘Streames, turn’: ‘stream turned’ N[Len]; 117 ‘pratty boyes’: ‘pratty bairns’ N[Len]; 118 ‘an hour or two’ N[Len]; 121 ‘winter’s evening’ N[Unf]; 125 ‘greene head’: ‘green heads’ N[Str]; 137 ‘linger here’ M[1TB]; 138 ‘to her content’ P[DB]; 140 ‘I must depart’ G[J4]; 140 ‘is set downe’ N[PP]; 141 ‘To these two’ G[FBB]; 143 ‘long labours’ N[SLW 526]; 148 ‘patronize their sports’: ‘patron of all witty sports’ N[PP]; 154 ‘one by one’ S[VA]; 157 ‘fragrant meades’: ‘fragrant mead’ P[HG]; 169 ‘breathe sweete’: ‘sweetly breathe’ G[ALG]; 174–5 ‘as cleare as Christall’ N[Str]; 175 ‘a pratty thing’: ‘a…prating thing’ S[Rom]; 176 ‘goe a begging with’: ‘came a begging to’ N[Len]; 181 ‘daunce a Galliard’ P[OWT]; 187 ‘no other end’ N[Unf]; 191 ‘A cleane trencher’ M[1TB]; 193 ‘in his daies’ P[E1]; 196 ‘but a foole’ S[TGV]; 198 ‘sit fast’ P[Alc].
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29 hits: Greene 3 (10.3%); Marlowe 2 (6.9%); Nashe 12 (41.4%); Peele: 6 (20.7%); Shakespeare 6 (20.7%).
3. Greene Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 1.1.1–100: 2 ‘heaven’s bright’ P[DB]; 9 ‘this hundred years’: ‘this hundred year’ N[SLW]; 12 ‘And now chang’d’ S[R2]; 15 ‘Tossing off ale’: ‘tossing many a good cup of ale’ G[ALG]; 17 ‘the bonny damsel fill’d us drink’: ‘the wench that fill’d us drink’ G[ALG]; 19 ‘a qualm did cross his stomach’: ‘a qualm…come too near her stomach’ G[ALG]; 33 ‘cap and…coat’: ‘coats and caps’ S[Shr]; 37 ‘beguile Love’: ‘beguiled love’ P[AP]; 50 ‘How provest thou that…?’: ‘How provest thou that?’ M[DF]; 51 ‘learned man’ M[DF]; 52 ‘many books’ N[Unf]; 56 ‘good reason’ G[Sel]; 58 ‘lighten forth’: ‘lightens forth’ S[R2]; 79 ‘she swept like Venus through the house’: ‘Iuno…/Came swiftly sweeping through the gloomy air’ G[Orl]; 85 ‘milk…cheese’: ‘cheese…milk’ G[ALG]; 97 ‘laid the plot’: ‘laid a plot’ M[E2].
16 hits: Greene 6 (37.5%); Marlowe 3 (18.8%); Nashe 2 (12.5%); Peele 2 (12.5%); Shakespeare 3 (18.8%).
4. Marlowe Doctor Faustus V.i.18–118: 20 ‘You shall behold’ S[Rom]; 20 ‘peerless dame’ P[Alc]; 22 ‘crossed the seas with her’: ‘cross the seas with her son’ M[E2]; 25 ‘Too simple’ G[Orl]; 27 ‘Greeks pursued’: ‘Greeks pursue’ M[Did]; 28 ‘With ten years’ war’ M[Did]; 28 ‘such a queen’: ‘such queens as’ M[1TB]; 29 ‘Who heavenly beauty’: ‘Whose heavenly presence beautified’ M[2TB]; 30 ‘pride of nature’s’ G[ALG]; 31 ‘only paragon’ M[1TB]; 31 ‘paragon of excellence’ G[ALG]; 32 ‘Let us depart’ G[Sel]; 36 ‘guide thy steps’: ‘guides his steps’ M[1TB]; 37 ‘By which sweet’: ‘Through which sweet’ M[1TB]; 39 ‘Break heart’ P[E1]; 39 ‘drop blood’: ‘dropping blood’ M[Did]; 48 ‘Despair and die’ S[R3]; 49 ‘calls for right’; ‘call for right’ P[DB]; 50 ‘Thine hour’ G[FBB]; 51 ‘do thee right’: ‘done thee right’ N[Len]; 53 ‘hovers o’er thy head’: ‘hover…about thy princely head’ P[Alc]; 66 ‘Thou traitor, Faustus’: ‘Thou traitor, Guise’ M[MP]; 68 ‘in piecemeal tear thy flesh’: ‘by piecemeals tear his…flesh’ P[E1]; 69–70 ‘entreat thy lord/To pardon…’: ‘I cannot
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pardon him/Entreat my lord’ M[E2]; 71 ‘I will confirm’ N[PP]; 73 ‘unfeignèd heart’ G[Sel]; 74 ‘greater danger’ N[Unf]; 75 ‘crooked age’ S[R2]; 78 ‘touch his soul’: ‘touch the soul’ P[Alc]; 81 ‘good servant’ G[J4]; 85 ‘extinguish clean’: ‘clean extinguished’ M[2TB]; 87 ‘keep mine oath’ S[Shr]; 88 ‘what else thou’ G[Sel]; 88 ‘thou shalt desire’ N[Str]; 89 ‘twinkling of an eye’ N[Len]; 90 ‘Was this the face’ S[R2]; ‘a thousand ships’ M[2TB]; 91 ‘topless towers’: ‘towers that topless touch’ G[ALG]; 91 ‘towers of Ilium’: Ilium’s lofty towers’ P[AP]; 92 ‘make me immortal with a kiss’ M[Did]; 93 ‘lips sucks forth’: ‘lips…have but lately sucked’ N[Unf]; 93 ‘sucks forth my soul’: ‘suck out my soul’ N[Unf ]; 93 ‘See where it flies’: ‘See where it is’ M[1TB]; 100 ‘plumèd crest’ G[Sel]; 101 ‘I will wound’ P[DB]; 102 ‘And then return’ S[R3]; 102 ‘for a kiss’ P[E1]; 107 ‘More lovely than’ S[VA]; 109 ‘none but thou’ N[PP]; 110 ‘miserable man’ P[E1]; 113 ‘with his pride’: ‘with their pride’ M[E2]; 114 ‘in this furnace’: ‘in the furnace’ M[2TB]; 118 ‘unto my God’ M[MP].
52 hits: Greene 10 (19.2%); Marlowe 18 (34.6%); Nashe 8 (15.4%); Peele 10 (19.2%); Shakespeare 6 (11.5%).
5. Peele Edward I 1.1.1–100: 2 ‘To do you honour’ M[1TB]; 2 ‘in your sovereign’s eyes’: ‘in my sovereign’s eyes’ P[DB]; 5 ‘The poor remainder of’: ‘The poor remainders of’ P[Alc]; 6 ‘Preserv’d by miracle’ P[DA]; 7 ‘Go mount your’: ‘go mount you’ G[Alp]; 8 ‘minutes are hours’: ‘minutes to be hours’ G[FBB]; 11 ‘ancient seat of kings’ P[AP]; 14 ‘conquests, spoils’: ‘of conquest and of spoil’ M[1TB]; ‘spoils, and victories’: ‘victory and…spoils’ P[Alc]; 16 ‘train’d in feats’: ‘train’d up in feats’ P[DB]; 18 ‘What climate under the meridian signs’: ‘Under the climate of the milder heaven’ P[AP]; 20 ‘quaked and trembled at the name’: ‘quake and tremble at the…name’ M[1TB]; 21 ‘mighty conquerors’ M[1TB]; 30 ‘ploughing the sea’: ‘plough…sea’ M[1TB]; 35 ‘troops of conquering lords’: ‘troops of conquered kings’ M[1TB]; 35 ‘warlike knights’ M[Jew]; 37 ‘by the head’: ‘by the heads’ M[E2]; 39 ‘behold our son’: ‘behold my son’ P[DB]; 40 ‘England’s peers’ M[E2]; 41 ‘my sweet sons’ M[2TB]; 45 ‘thrice-valiant sons’: ‘thrice-valiant lords’ P[Alc]; 46
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‘amaze not’ G[ALG]; 54 ‘Since your departure’ S[R3]; 54 ‘Christian wars’ P[Alc]; 55 ‘prince your son’ S[R3]; 56 ‘Almain’s emperor: ‘the Almain emperor’ G[FBB]; 58 ‘sad laments’ M[E2]; 60 ‘my noble father’ S[R3]; 61 ‘thousand worlds’ M[Did]; 62 ‘arrest of …death’: ‘arrest of death’ P[HG]; 63 ‘Death…all alike’ G[Sel]; 66 ‘I do salute’ S[R2]; 69 ‘princely states’: ‘princely state’ P[AP]; 70 ‘hearts’ content’: ‘heart’s content’ G[Alp]; 73 ‘sweet queen’ M[Did]; 74 ‘fellow-mate in arms’: ‘fellow mates at feast’ G[ALG]; 78 ‘and of arms’ P[Alc]; 85 ‘brazen gates’ P[OWT]; 87 ‘got the name’ M[E2]; 88 ‘knightsat-arms’ P[War]; 92 ‘captive kings’ M[E2]; 94 ‘English Edward’: ‘English Edward’s’ G[FBB]; 96 ‘country’s fame’ P[Alc].
43 hits: Greene 8 (18.6%); Marlowe 15 (34.9%); Nashe 0; Peele 16 (37.2%); Shakespeare 4 (9.3%).
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