The Authorship of " King Henry VI." 173 



to verse music and feeling, and yet witli the perfect appropriateness 

 to the new context which appear in examples 1—28, it seems utterly- 

 fantastic to imagine that this writer could then proceed to compose 

 from his own mind other hues perfectly suggestive of Marlowe and 

 to vary these original lines in precisely the manner in which he had 

 varied those stolen from Marlowe. No poet, it may probably be said, 

 who plagiarizes largely from another, will plagiarize from himself 

 in the same manner and to the same relative extent. Yet no one, 

 I think, can compare such parallels as those cited above in (b), (c), 

 (d), in (6), (11), (17), and in (35), (38), (42) without feeling that in 

 each case the same mind has been at work both in the original con- 

 ception of the idea and in its later repetition. To conclude otherwise 

 would be to assume that there existed, all unknown to history, an 

 exact intellectual double to one of the most original and peculiar 

 geniuses in English literature. 



I believe that Marlowe's authorship of the Contention and True 

 Tragedy is sufficiently attested, in so far as the parallel passages bear 

 upon the question, by what has been already said. There is, however, 

 a further point which it seems improper to ignore, since it offers 

 positive evidence in the same direction. It will have been observed 

 that decidedly the greatest number of the resemblances between the 

 Contention and True Tragedy and the canonical plays of Marlowe in 

 the hst given on pp. 164—169 refer to Edward II and The Massacre 

 at Paris. Of the twenty-eight parallels there cited, fourteen concern 

 the former play and nine the latter. The obvious inference from 

 this is that these four dramas, all dealing with historical themes, 

 were composed within relatively short limits of time. It is important 

 to attempt to fix the precise sequence of the four plays in question, 

 since the theory that an unidentified author imitated Marlowe in 

 the Contention and True Tragedy is tenable only on the assumption 

 that the latter plays are subsequent to those from which they appear 

 to borrow. 



Some of the parallels offer evidence on this question. Wherever 

 a passage appearing in two plays is naturally suggested by the con- 

 text in one, while in the other it appears out of keeping or unne- 

 cessary to the argument, I think it may be assumed that the passage 

 is original in the former instance and has been gratuitously intro- 

 duced in the second either by a trick of the author's memory or by 

 the conscious imitation of a later writer. Now, in regard to The 

 Massacre at Paris, though the material for inference is rather scanty, 

 the probabihties seem to favor the priority of that play to The 

 Contention and The True Tragedy. For example, the allusion to the 



Trans. Conn. Acad., Vol. XVII. 12 July, 1912. 



