198 C. F. Tucker Brooke, 



spearean revision. It adds also very notably to the pathos and 

 attractiveness of the good Duke Humphrey. In Marlowe's strenuous 

 philosophy of hfe, nothing succeeded like success. Genial and 

 sympathetic as was the character of the Duke in the chronicles, 

 the Contention has a decided tendency to slight the treatment of 

 this representative of defeated magnanimity in the ardent interest 

 with which the play ft)llows the rising fortunes of Humphrey's rivals, 

 Margaret, Suffolk, and York. The 1623 version does much more 

 justice to the claims of Humphrey's personality, thus broadening the 

 humanity of the work, and reflecting again that impartiality in the 

 judgment of character, which from the first made Shakespeare's 

 equipment as a dramatist superior to Marlowe's. 



Otherwise, it can hardly be held that Shakespeare's adaptation 

 greatly enriched the plays we are discussing either in plot or in 

 portraiture. Within the narrow psychological province where Mar- 

 lowe's genius was at its best — ^in the depicting of evil ambition^ 

 Shakespeare was in 1592 only a pupil, and he seems to have been 

 content to leave the outlines of the great figures of York, Suffolk, 

 Margaret, Warwick, and Richard as he found them. Certainly the 

 minor alterations which he admitted were quite insufficient in all 

 these cases to obscure the deep impression of Marlowe's original 

 sketch. So, too, the plot of 2 SLndjHenry VI hinges upon the partic- 

 ular kind of interest which Marlowe read into the story of the chron- 

 iclers ; and, though Shakespeare, as befitted the professional actor, 

 occasionally rearranged the old scenes in the interests of practical 

 stage-craft — notably in the case of scenes ii— vii of Act IV of J Henry 

 VI — he did not essentially affect the general method or tone of his 

 models. 



Thus, the reader of the later version should bear in mind that, 

 with the rather unimportant exceptions just mentioned, the second 

 and third parts of Henry VI represent the ideas and the dramatic 

 theory of Marlowe, though about half the actual Hues printed in the 

 1623 Folio may be due either to the independent composition or to 

 the careful re-writing of Shakespeare. 



Enough has probably been said in other connexions to refute the 

 unfounded hypothesis of Miss Lee that Shakespeare was assisted by 

 Marlowe in his revision. To assume that either Marlowe or Shake- 

 speare was concerned with these plays in more than one of the 

 phases of their evolution is merely to set up a conjecture, unsup- 

 ported by fact or likelihood, for the purpose of needlessly involving 

 the question of authorship. No known circumstance in the life 

 of either poet suggests the possibility of collaboration between 



