The Authorship of " King Henry VI." 159 



the others, are good characters. The prince perhaps need not be 

 seriously considered, because he appears relatively little and owes 

 his romantic courage quite as much to the chronicle accounts as to 

 the poet's original portraiture. The other three figures are likely 

 to surprise the readers of the Contention and True Tragedy by their 

 comparative tameness. It was in the presentation of the good 

 characters that Shakespeare found his most fruitful opportunity 

 to improve upon the dehneation of the eariier plays. It is remarkable, 

 certainly, that in the Contention the picture of so mean a creature 

 as Suffolk remains clearer in the memor}^ than that of Humphrey, 

 the real hero of the epoch in the chronicle accounts and a particularly 

 promising subject, one would say, for dramatic presentation. There 

 is no question, I think, that the Contention fails on the whole to make 

 Duke Humphrey and King Henry vivid personalities, and that the 

 True Tragedy makes the capable and relatively virtuous Edward 

 a far less interesting figure than either the villainous Richard or the 

 madly impetuous and mischief-making Warwick. The same uncon- 

 vincingness in the normal or good characters must strike the student 

 of the acknowledged work of Marlowe, for that poet appears never 

 to have been able to separate virtue from mediocrity or to portray 

 vivid personality except in the prosecution of godless and desperate 

 extravagance. To depict sympathetically and persuasively a great 

 man strong in righteousness, as, for example, the unknown author 

 of the contemporary play of Woodstock did with an earlier Duke of 

 Gloucester very similar to Humphrey in character and fate, seems 

 to have been decidedly beyond the range of Marlowe's genius. The 

 representation of the king's well-meaning brother Edmund in 

 Edward II and even of the great figure of Henry of Navarre in the 

 Massacre at Paris illustrates the same failure on the poet's part to 

 rise to the possibilities latent in the portrayal of simple nobleness. 

 It would appear, therefore, that the presentation of character in 

 the Contention and the True Tragedy manifests both the special 

 merits and also the particular hmitations of Marlowe's work. I think, 

 moreover, that the parallel between the characters of the plays we 

 are considering and those of accepted Marlovian dramas can be traced 

 yet farther. Careful readers will hardly fail to notice the close 

 resemblance between the complex quadrangle of relations between 

 Henry VI, Margaret, Suffolk, and Prince Edward in our plays and 

 the relations of Edward II, Isabella, Young Mortimer, and Prince 

 Edward in Edward II. So, too, the similarity between the treat- 

 ment of Margaret's experiences at the French court and those of 

 Isabella in Edward II seems very much closer than historic coin- 



