If these two opinions be rejected, we must suppose that Shakspeare borrowed without scruple, from the work of another, the substance and stuff which he afterward enriched with his own embroidery. His numerous borrowings from the dramatic authors of this time render this supposition very easy of credence, and the following fact, in this special instance, is almost equivalent to a proof of its legitimacy. In the first place, it must be observed that the two original pieces which were printed in 1600 existed as early as 1593; for we find them, at that period, registered under the same title, and with the name of the same bookseller, in the registers of the Stationers' Company. What cause delayed the publication of these two plays until 1600, it is useless just now to discuss; but the proof of the antiquity of their existence acquires, in the discussion which now occupies our attention, considerable importance from the following passage in a pamphlet by Greene, a very prolific author, who died in the month of September, 1592. In this pamphlet, which was written a short time before his death, and printed immediately after, as he had ordered in his will, Green addresses his farewell advice to several of his friends, literary men like himself; and the object of this advice is to dissuade them from working for the theatre, if they desire to escape the griefs of which he complains. One of the motives which he gives for so doing is the imprudence of trusting to the actors; for, he says, "there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, [Footnote 33] supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in the country." [Footnote 34]
[Footnote 33: In allusion to a line in the old play—
"The First Part of the Contention:"
"O, tyger's heart, wrapt in a woman's hide.">[
[Footnote 34: Greene's "Groatsworth of Wit," 1592.]
These passages leave no doubt as to Shakspeare's having borrowed from Greene as early as in 1592; and as the three parts of "Henry VI." are the only dramas of our poet which it is believed can be placed before that period, the question would seem to be almost settled; while, at the same time, the quotation by Greene, on this occasion, of a line from the original play, would prove that it was this borrowing which went to his heart. It is, therefore, very probable that Shakspeare, who was then an actor, and exercised the activity of his genius as yet only for the advantage of his troop, may have tried to bring upon the stage, with greater success, dramas already known, and the substance of which furnished him with a few beauties which he could turn to account. As plays then belonged, according to all appearances, to the actors who had bought them, the undertaking was a natural one, and the success of "Henry VI." may probably have been the first indication, in reliance upon which a genius as yet ignorant of its own strength ventured to dart forward on its career.
In order to explain why Shakspeare, after thus remodeling the two plays from which he constructed the second and third parts of "Henry VI.," did not do the same work for the first part, it will be sufficient to suppose that the first part already enjoyed enough success upon the stage to prevent the interest of the actors from requiring any change in it. This supposition is, moreover, supported by a passage in a pamphlet by Thomas Nashe, in which he says, "How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times), who, in the tragedian that represents his person, behold him fresh bleeding." [Footnote 35]
[Footnote 35: Nashe's "Pierce Penniless; his Supplication to the Devil.">[
Nashe, the intimate friend of Greene, would probably not have spoken in such terms of one of Shakspeare's plays, and perhaps the success achieved by this drama may have induced Shakspeare to render the other two parts worthy to share in its triumph; but even with this supposition, it would be difficult not to believe that, either before or afterward, Shakspeare had enhanced, by a few touches, the coloring of a work which had only succeeded in pleasing his contemporaries because Shakspeare had not yet made his appearance. The scenes, therefore, between Talbot and his son must be by him, or else we must believe that before his time there existed in England a dramatic author capable of attaining that touching and noble truthfulness of which very few, even of his successors, have divined the secret. Nothing can be finer than this description of the two heroes—one dying, and the other scarcely initiated into a warrior's life; the first, satiated with glory, and, in his paternal anxiety, desirous rather to save the life than the honor of his son; the other, stern and inflexible, determined to prove his filial affection by seeking death at his father's side, and by his carefulness thus to maintain the honor of his race. This position, varied by all the alternations of fear and hope which can be occasioned by the chances of a battle, in which the father saves his son, and the son is eventually slain at a distance from his father, contains in itself almost the interest of a drama; and there is every reason to believe that Shakspeare added this ornament to a play which his close connection with those parts of it which he had remodeled had, as it were, incorporated into his works. It must also be observed, that the scenes between Talbot and his son are almost entirely in rhyme, as is the case in many of Shakspeare's works, whereas, in the rest of the play, as well as in the two plays which appear to be intended as a continuation of it, there is scarcely a rhyme to be found. The scene which, in the first part of "Henry VI.," contains most rhyme, is that in which we behold Mortimer dying in prison, and we might therefore suppose that it had received at least some additions from the hand of Shakspeare. These additions, and a few others perhaps, in all not very numerous, may have furnished the editors of 1623 with what appeared to them a sufficient reason for including, among the works of a poet who had excelled all competitors, a play which owed entire its merit to what he had added to it, and which was also necessarily connected with two other works which contained too much of his composition to be omitted from the number of his productions.
As to the insertion of Shakspeare's name in Pavier's edition of the two original plays, it is easy to explain it as a bookseller's trick—a kind of fraud extremely common at that time, and which has been practised in reference to several dramatic works composed upon subjects which Shakspeare had treated, and which the publishers hoped to sell by favor of his name. This conjecture is rendered all the more probable by the fact that this edition is undated, although we know that it appeared in 1619, which might be a petty bookselling scheme to make purchasers believe that it had appeared during the lifetime of the author whose name it had borrowed.
We are ignorant of the precise period of the performance of the first part of "Henry VI.," which, according to Malone, originally bore the name of "The Historical Play of King Henry the Sixth." The style of this play, except so much of it as we may attribute to Shakspeare, bears the same character as that of all the dramatic works of the period which preceded the compositions of our poet: the grammatical construction is very irregular, the tone is simple but undignified, and the versification sufficiently prosaic. The interest, which is somewhat mediocre—although the play is full of movement—is furthermore greatly diminished, in our view, by the ridiculous and uncouth absurdity of the part of Joan of Arc, which may, however, give us a most exact idea of the spirit in which the English chroniclers have written the history of this heroic maiden, and of the aspect under which they have described her. In this sense the play is historical.