The Authorship of "King Henry VI." 153 



This singleness of purpose and feeling, in dramas dealing with 

 a particularly chaotic era and belonging clearly to the earliest period 

 in the development of the history play, is a very remarkable pheno- 

 menon. How far such solidarity of outlook lay from the j-outhful 

 Shakespeare wall be abundantly clear when we come to analyze 

 the spirit in which the changes introduced into the revised 2 and 3 

 Henry VI were made. How infinitely far it lay from Peele and 

 Greene need hardly be suggested to any one who has considered 

 the wonderful medleys of plot and tone illustrated in Edward I, 

 James IV, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Leaving all con- 

 firmatory evidence out of mind, I believe that it would be safe to 

 assert that the brilliant synthesis of plot and emotion manifested in 

 the Contention and True Tragedy can about 1590 have been the work 

 of only one dramatist known to literary history. The whole tangled 

 story is resolutely pitched in a single key, preserved with hardly 

 a fluctuation through the two plays, which thus become a kind of 

 monody on the single note of ambition, transmitted from the throat 

 of one leading figure to that of the next, from York's glorious 

 vaunt in the first scene of the Contention to Richard's final pro- 

 clamation of his magnificent villainy at the close of the True Tragedy. 

 This insistence upon one mood and one aspect produces a sense of 

 order in the midst of plot confusion and a touch also of that fine 

 lucidity which in classic works accompanies restrictedness of view. 



For other examples of this rare unity injected into ill-unified 

 matter by the vividness of the poet's feeling one can turn among 

 plays contemporary with those we are discussing only to the ac- 

 cepted works of Marlowe. Through the two parts of Tamburlaine 

 the fervid expression of heaven-topping egoism lends consecutive- 

 ness and meaning to the hopelessly iU-ordered material. In Edward II, 

 the first great Enghsh historical play, a ^vild, purposeless reign and 

 an uninteresting monarch are made deeply affecting by the con- 

 sistent tragedy which the poet, almost gratuitously, reads into them. 

 An even closer parallel to the tone and method of the Contention 

 and True Tragedy is found in Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, where 

 French history during seventeen years just past (1572—1589) is 

 carelessly depicted in connexion with the three sensational inci- 

 dents of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the death of the Due 

 de Guise, and the assassination of Henri IH. Here there is no sem- 

 blance of technical unity. Yet the reader hardly perceives any 

 incoherence, because the consuming anti-papal ardor of the poet 

 is strong enough to focuss and bring into apparent relation all the 

 ahen elements of the plaj'. 



