Q. Margaret. O, could this kiss be printed in thy hand.

1826.

Acr iii. Sc. 2.

SECOND PART OF

King Henry the Sixth.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS.

THIS and the Third Part of King Henry VI. contain that troublesome period of this prince's reign which took in the whole contention between the houses of York and Lancaster: and under that title were these two plays first acted and published. The present play opens with King Henry's marriage, which was in the twenty-third year of his reign [A. D. 1545], and closes with the first battle fought at St. Albans, and won by the York faction, in the thirty-third year of his reign [A. D. 1455]: so that it comprises the history and transactions of ten years.

The Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster was published in quarto; the first part in 1594; the second, or True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, in 1595; and both were reprinted in 1600. In a dissertation annexed to these plays Mr. Malone has endeavoured to establish the fact that these two dramas were not originally written by Shakspeare, but by some preceding author or authors before the year 1590; and that upon them Shakspeare formed this and the following drama, altering, retrenching, or amplifying as he thought proper. I will endeavour to give a brief abstract of the principal arguments. 1. The entry on the Stationers' books, in 1594, does not mention the name of Shakspeare; nor are the plays printed with his name in the early editions; but, after the poet's death, an edition was printed by one Pavier without date, but really, in 1619, with the name of Shakspeare on the title

lage. This he has shown to be a common fraudulent practice of the booksellers of that period. When Pavier republished The Contention of the Two Houses, &c. in 1619, he omitted the words as it was acted by the earl of Pembrooke his servantes,' which appeared on the original title-page,-just as on the republication of the old play of King John, in two parts, in 1611, the words 'as it was acted in the honourable city of London' were omitted; because the omitted words in both cases marked the respective pieces not to be the production of Shakspeare. And, as in King John, the letters W. Sh. were added, in 1611, to deceive the purebaser; so in the republication of The whole Contention, &c. Pavier, having dismissed the words above-mentioned, inserted these:-'Newly corrected and enlarged by William Shakspere:' knowing that these pieces had been made the groundwork of two other plays; that they had in fact been corrected and enlarged (though not in his copy, which was a mere reprint from the edition of 1600), and exhibited under the titles of the Second and Third Parts of King Henry VI.; and hoping that this new edition of the original plays would pass for those altered and augmented by Shakspeare, which were then unpublished.

A passage from Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, adduced by Mr. Tyrwhitt, first suggested and strongly supports Malone's hypothesis. The writer, Robert Greene, is supposed to address himself to his poetical friend, George Peele, in these words :— 'Yes, trust them not [alluding to the players], for there is an upstart crowe BEAUTIFIED WITH OUR FEATHERS that, with his tygres heart wrapt in a players hide, supposes hee is well able to bombaste out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Joannes factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a country.'-' O tyger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide!' is a line in the old quarto play entitled The First Part of the Contention, &c. There seems to be no doubt that the allusion is to Shakspeare, that the old plays may have been the production of Greene, Peele, and Marlowe, or some of them; and that Greene could not conceal his mortification, at the fame of him

self and his associates, old and established playwrights, being eclipsed by a new upstart writer (for so he calls the poet), who had then perhaps first attracted the notice of the public by exhibiting two plays formed upon old dramas written by them, considerably enlarged and improved. The very term that Greene uses, 'to bombast out a blank verse,' exactly corresponds with what has been now suggested. This new poet, says he, knows as well as any man how to amplify and swell out a blank verse. Shakspeare did for the old plays what Berni had before done to the Orlando Innamorato of Boïardo. He wrote new beginnings to the Acts; he new versified, he new modelled, he transposed many of the parts; and greatly amplified and improved the whole. Several lines, however, and whole speeches, which he thought sufficiently polished, he accepted, and introduced, without any, or very slight, alterations.

Malone adopted the following expedient to mark these alterations and adoptions, which has been followed in the present edition:-All those lines which the poet adopted without any alteration are printed in the usual manner; those speeches which he altered or expanded are distinguished by inverted commas ; and to all lines entirely composed by himself asterisks are prefixed.

The internal evidences upon which Malone relies to establish his position are, 1. The variations between the two old plays in quarto, and the corresponding pieces in the folio edition of Shakspeare's dramatic works, which are of so peculiar a nature as to mark two distinct hands. Some circumstances are mentioned in the old quarto plays, of which there is not the least trace in the folio; and many minute variations occur that prove the pieces in the quarto to have been original and distinct compositions. No copyist or shorthand writer would invent circumstances totally different from those which appear in Shakspeare's new modelled draughts, as exhibited in the first folio; or insert whole speeches, of which scarcely a trace is found in that edition. In some places a speech in one of these quartos consists of ten or twelve lines: in Shakspeare's folio the same speech consists