The Authorship of "King Henry VI." 203 



So York must sit and fret and bite his tongue 



While his own lands are bargain'd for and sold. 



Me thinks the realms of England, France, and Ireland 



Bear that proportion to my flesh and blood 



As did the fatal brand Althaea burn'd 



Unto the prince's heart of Calydon."^ 



After this hne is then printed the whole of Marlowe's speech, 



" Anjou and Maine both given unto the French ! 

 Cold news for me, for I had hope of France," etc. 



Unquestionably, the Shakespearean insertion here weakens the 

 effect of the passage. The new matter is in this case so completely 

 discordant from the old as to leave no doubt of its different author- 

 ship. The fiery expression of York's iron resolution, which in the 

 original lines forces itself from the speaker's mouth in language of 

 the directest self -revelation, contrasts sharply with the rambhng 

 sentimentalism of the Shakespearean part, where five lines of mere 

 statistical recapitulation are followed by a far-away metaphor of 

 pirates and an affected simile relating to Althaea's brand. Divided 

 authorship can hardly have produced many more complete perver- 

 sions than this, where Marlowe's confident, calculating York, flushed 

 with the sense of power and the promise of supreme triumph, is 

 represented by Shakespeare as a " silly " merchant in the grasp of 

 pirates, weeping over his lost goods and wringing his hapless hands ; 

 shaking his head and standing aloof, " While all is shar'd and all is 

 borne away," or sitting and fretting and biting his tongue, " While 

 his own lands are bargain'd for and sold." In writing this score of 

 lines, Shakespeare was impelled not by the desire of voicing more 

 truly the real character of York, but merely by the ambition of the 

 young poet to express a couple of pretty notions — or, in Greene's 

 phrase, " to bumbast out blank verse " with the great master of that 

 metre. In the soliloquy of Hume at the end of the next scene(2 HenryVI, 

 I, ii), it is equally clear that Shakespeare is somewhat tastelessly 

 padding out the lines of Marlowe. Instead of the sober presen- 

 tation of the state of affairs which the Contention gives in thirteen 

 lines, the 1623 edition fills twenty-one with feeble plays on words 



^ Something has been made of the fact that the correct version of the 

 Althaea story here disagrees Avdth the incorrect allusion in 2 Henry IV, II, 

 ii, 98 ff. It should be remembered that when Shakespeare wrote the latter 

 passage, his recollection of the mythology learned in his school-boy days 

 had become some six years dimmer. 



