Henry VI Part 1 (1918) Yale/Appendix C
APPENDIX C
The Authorship of the Play
I. Shakespeare's Concern in It
With regard to the connection of Shakespeare with 1 Henry VI four different opinions have been put forward:
(1) Shakespeare had no part in the play. This was apparently the view of Richard Farmer, who says (Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare, 1767): 'Henry the sixth hath ever been doubted; and [Nashe's allusion in Pierce Penniless] may give us reason to believe it was previous to our Author. . . . I have no doubt but Henry the sixth had the same Author with Edward the third.' Malone[1] and Drake[2] took the negative position strongly, and Collier flirted with it,[3] while more recently Dowden (Shakspere: His Mind and Art, 173; Shakspere Primer, etc.) and Furnivall (Introduction to Leopold Shakspere) have virtually denied any real trace of Shakespeare in the work.
(2) Shakespeare wrote the entire play. Samuel Johnson favored this hypothesis, arguing that 'from mere inferiority nothing can be inferred; in the productions of wit there will be inequality.' He was supported by his colleague Steevens, who remarks:
'This historical play might have been one of our author's earliest dramatick efforts; and almost every young poet begins his career by imitation. Shakspeare therefore, till he felt his own strength, perhaps servilely conformed to the style and manner of his predecessors.'[4] Charles Knight in the Pictorial Shakspeare (1867) asserted with much greater positiveness that all the three parts of Henry VI 'are, in the strictest sense of the word, Shakspeare's own plays,' and was followed by the American critics, Verplanck (1847) and Hudson.[5] Such has been the view almost unanimously of the Germans: Schlegel, Bodenstedt, Delius, Ulrici, Sarrazin, Brandl, Creizenach (Gervinus is the honorable exception). The only recent British scholar to espouse this cause is, I believe, Courthope,[6] who in a remarkable Appendix 'On the Authenticity of Some of the Early Plays Assigned to Shakespeare and their Relationship to the Development of his Dramatic Genius' (History of English Poetry, vol. iv, 1903) goes even farther than Knight.
(3) Shakespeare collaborated with other dramatists to produce the play. Grant White (Essay on the Authorship of King Henry the Sixth, 1859) supposes that 'It is not improbable that Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and Shakespeare were all engaged upon it,' and suggests 'that within two or three years of Shakespeare's arrival in London, that is, about 1587 or 1588, he was engaged to assist Marlowe, Greene, and perhaps Peele, in dramatizing the events of King Henry the Sixth's reign.' Ingram (Marlowe and his Associates, 1904) writes that 1 Henry VI 'furnishes but slight evidence of containing much of the handiwork of the two men, Marlowe and Shakespeare, who are now believed [sic] to have jointly remodelled it'; and Hart (Arden Shakespeare, 1909) reasons: 'We are at liberty to place Part I, in so far as it is Shakespeare's, as his earliest work with a date of about 1589-90. . . . I see no reason, therefore, to look for an imaginary earlier completed play. . . . We can imagine very easily that Shakespeare was invited to lend a hand to Greene and Peele.'
(4) Shakespeare, working by himself, revised an earlier play of different authorship. Theobald seems first to have formulated this theory: 'Though there are several master-strokes in these three plays [of Henry VI], which incontestably betray the workmanship of Shakspeare; yet I am almost doubtful whether they were entirely of his writing. And unless they were wrote by him very early, I should rather imagine them to have been brought to him as a director of the stage; and so have received some finishing beauties at his hand.'[7] Such is the opinion of Coleridge, Gervinus, Staunton, Halliwell-Phillipps, and Dyce, the last of whom definitely repudiates the Grant White theory: 'not written by Shakespeare in conjunction with any other author or authors, but . . . a comparatively old drama, which he slightly altered and improved.' Fleay gives precise, but highly dubious, details (Life and Work of Shakspere, 1886) : 'About 1588-9 Marlowe plotted, and, in conjunction with Kyd (or Greene), Peele, and Lodge, wrote 1 Henry VI for the Queen's men. . . . In 1591-2 the Queen's men were in distress and sold, among other plays, 1 Henry VI to Lord Strange's men, who produced it in 1592 with Shakspere's Talbot additions as a new play.' Rives (1874) argues that Shakespeare revised and expanded an old play dealing exclusively with the wars in France, and Henneman (1901) comes to much the same conclusion. Gray (1917) allows Shakespeare's revisionary labor a somewhat less wide, but still very extensive scope. Herford (Eversley Shakespeare), Rolfe, and Sir Sidney Lee limit the signs of his hand to a couple of scenes; while Ward, Gollancz and Schelling stress their belief that Shakespeare was not properly a reviser, but a 'contributor' of 'additions' to the original work.
This last theory, with its differing implications, has vastly the largest number of upholders at the present time, and is indeed the only one that can be brought into reasonable harmony with the evidence. In regard to the particular scenes to be ascribed to Shakespeare there has been no radical variation among good critics. Nearly all credit Shakespeare with II. iv (the Temple Garden dispute); a large majority also with II. v (the death of Mortimer), which naturally links itself with the foregoing, and with the whole or most of IV. ii-vii (Talbot's death). With less assurance V. iii. 45-195 (Suffolk's wooing of Margaret) is added. In all these there are strong indications of Shakespeare. Note the plays on words: 'I love no colours, and without all colour' (II. iv. 34); 'And in that ease, I'll tell thee my disease' (II. v. 44); 'And they shall find dear deer of us' (IV. ii. 54), together with the technical deer-hunting allusions in the last passage and the hawk, dog, horse references in II. iv. 11-14.
Compare also the bold use of transferred adjectives, quite Shakespearean and quite unlike the general style of the play as a whole: 'In dumb significants' (II. iv. 26), 'this pale and maiden blossom' (II. iv. 47), 'this pale and angry rose' (II. iv. 107), 'my blood-drinking hate' (II. iv. 108), 'death and deadly night' (II. iv. 127), 'feet whose strengthless stay is numb' (II. v. 13), 'sweet enlargement' (II. v. 30), 'the dusky torch of Mortimer' (II. v. 122), 'your stately and air-braving towers' (IV. ii. 13), 'the process of his sandy hour' (IV. ii. 36), 'sleeping neglection' (IV. iii. 49), 'That ever living man of memory' (IV. iii. 51), 'bring thy father to his drooping chair' (IV. v. 5), 'bold-fac'd victory' (IV. vi. 12).
Especially Shakespearean are the fanciful metaphors and similes which abound in these scenes: 'Were growing time once ripen'd to my will' (II. iv. 99); 'I'll note you in my book of memory' (II. iv. 101); 'these gray locks, the pursuivants of Death' (II. v. 5); 'These eyes, like lamps whose wasting oil is spent' (II. v. 8); 'pithless arms, like to a wither'd vine That droops his sapless branches to the ground' (II. v. 11, 12); 'Just death, kind umpire of men's miseries' (II. v. 29); 'But now thy uncle is removing hence, As princes do their courts, when they are cloy'd With long continuance in a settled place' (II. v. 104-106); 'To wall thee from the liberty of flight' (IV. ii. 24); 'girdled with a waist of iron' (IV. iii. 20); 'ring'd about with bold adversity' (IV. iv. 14); 'Now thou art seal'd the son of chivalry' (IV. vi. 29); 'To save a paltry life and slay bright fame' (IV. vi. 45); 'Triumphant death, smear'd with captivity' (IV. vii. 3); 'inhearsed in the arms Of the most bloody nurser of his harms' (IV. vii. 46); 'Twinkling another counterfeited beam' (V. iii. 63).
Consideration of the passages just cited, which are fairly representative, though of course not complete, will, I think, suggest a gradual decrease through the scenes concerned in the recognizable Shakespearean quality. The Temple Garden and Mortimer scenes are rather more positively like Shakespeare than the blank verse Talbot passages, and decidedly more so than the rimed Talbot passages (IV. iii. 28–46, IV. v. 16–vii. 50) or the Suffolk—Margaret scene. This is reasonable, since the first two scenes bear most appearance of being spontaneous with the reviser of the play, and since Shakespeare's language is regularly bolder in blank verse than in rime.
It would be hazardous to attempt to infer from the style alone the date at which Shakespeare wrote his scenes.[8] The diction does not seem to me that of the poet's earliest period; and Furnivall has observed that the proportion of extra-syllabled lines in the Temple Garden scene (about 26 per cent) 'forbids us supposing it is very early work.' It would also be ill-advised to set precise limits for Shakespeare's part in the play. His hand is most evident in the scenes just discussed, but Talbot's death must, I think, have been a conspicuous feature of the original pre-Shakespearean play, and it is unlikely that the reviser here removed all traces of his predecessor. On the other hand, it is entirely reasonable to suspect Shakespearean penciling in scenes where the handling is too light or too perfunctory to leave any definite impression of genius. In particular, Mr. Gray finds evidence of the greater writer in the opening of III. i and in the Vernon—Basset quarrel (III. iv. 28 ff. and IV. i. 78 ff.). I am impressed by Henneman's suggestion that IV. i as a whole is the reviser's replica of III. iv (cf. note on IV. i): there seems to be nothing in the later scene which Shakespeare might not have written, and a positive clue may perhaps be found in the fact that Talbot's account of the Battle of Patay is here certainly taken from Holinshed rather than Halle.[9] Another hint of the same kind appears in I. ii in the adoption from Holinshed's second edition of the favorable view of Joan of Arc (which Holinshed explains that he derives from French sources), whereas the remainder of the play gives an inharmonious conception drawn from the earlier English chronicles.[10]
The reviser's hand, presumably Shakespeare's, is evident in the way the close of 1 Henry VI is shaped to fit it as an introduction to Part II of the trilogy. Henneman states the relationship of the three parts with accuracy, if with undue caution: 'So specifically does I prepare for II and III in certain particulars that it is conceivable that I was written after II and that III had already been planned.' If he means in the case of Part I, not the original composition, but the reviser's adaptation, it is certain, I think, that I follows II. Note that the thirty-ninth line of the play, where Winchester says to Gloucester, 'Thy wife is proud; she holdeth thee in awe,' can only be rationally explained as a preparation for Part II. The gibe means nothing as regards Part I. Again, the conclusion of Part I can only have been worked into an open advertisement for Part II,
'Margaret shall now be queen, and rule the king;
But I will rule both her, the king, and realm,'
after Parts II and III had passed into the possession of Shakespeare's company, and been adapted for representation by them. The 1592 Harry the Sixth cannot well be imagined to have ended so, for Pembroke's company appear at this time to have owned the early versions of Parts II and III.[11] It is not reasonable that Strange's company should have employed a conclusion quite out of keeping with their main theme of Talbot's glory and explicable only as preparing the audience for the play of a rival company.
That the original ending of the play was greatly changed by the reviser appears from textual evidence, which Fleay with characteristic subtlety noted, and, I think, characteristically misinterpreted. The marking of acts and scenes in the only early edition—that of the Folio—is entirely regular as far as the close of Act III (save that the individual scenes of Acts I and II are not divided off); and it is extraordinarily chaotic in Acts IV and V. Practically the whole close of the play (from IV. i through V. iv) is given as Act IV, Act V consisting only of the short last scene (V. v), and being marked at all probably merely in order to secure the conventional total of five acts. The six scenes dealing with Talbot's death (IV. ii-vii) are undivided and carelessly tacked on to IV. i, with which they have only a remote organic connection. From this Fleay argues that the Talbot scenes are a patch of new material, not corresponding to anything in the old play: 'It is plain that they were written subsequently to the rest of the play and inserted at a revival. They had to be inserted in such a manner as not to break the connection between this play and 2 Henry VI; and were put in the most convenient place, regardless of historic sequence.' I think the reverse is true: that it was the necessity of creating a spurious connection with 2 Henry VI which produced the disorder. Originally the Talbot scenes probably came nearer the end of the play and stood in closer relationship to their natural complement, the retributive overthrow of Joan (V. ii, iii. 1-44, iv. 1-93) and the final submission of the Dauphin (V. iv. 116-175). On this unhistorical, but very dramatic note of national vindication the old play may be supposed to have concluded. To change this note to that of pessimism and foreboding with which Part II opens was the reviser's problem.[12] It required a complete volte-face, which has been executed with dexterity but probably at a cost to the effectiveness of this play (considered individually and not as the introduction to a great tetralogy) for which Shakespeare's improvement of the poetry in the Talbot scenes does not compensate. The patchwork is most painfully evident where the otherwise admirable Suffolk—Margaret—Reignier scene (V. iii. 45-195) is pasted in between two sections of the Joan story.
The last scene in the play, constituting the entire Actus Quintus of the Folio, clearly belongs altogether to the later recension. The writing of so purely utilitarian a scene was small game for Shakespeare, but the execution is by no means un-Shakespearean.[13]
Henneman's summary of Shakespeare's probable purpose in 1 Henry VI is, I think, fair and conservative: 'To work up or rewrite the Talbot portions of the Chronicles, probably, though not necessarily, already crystallized into an old play on the triumph of "brave Talbot" over the French, which possessed the hated Joan of Arc scenes and all; to intensify the figure and character of Talbot; to work over or add scenes like those touching Talbot's death; to connect him with the deplorable struggles of the nobles; to invent, by a happy poetical thought, the origin of the factions of the Red and White Roses in the Temple Garden; to sound at once the note of weakness in the king continued in the succeeding Parts, and thus convert the old Talbot material effectually into a Henry VI drama; and to close with the wooing of Margaret as specific introduction to Part II,—something like this seems the task that the dramatist set himself to perform.'
II. The Author of the Original Play
1. Marlowe?
Henslowe's play of Harry the Sixth, if it followed somewhat the lines just suggested, undoubtedly deserved the popularity it attained. It was probably more effective on the stage than the expanded work which supplanted it, and in 1591-92 can have been written only by a real poet and a skilled dramatist. There were not many such at this period. Marlowe was one, but I concur warmly in Mr. Gray's opinion that 'Marlowe himself cannot be read into this drama.' Marlowe's influence, however, is unquestionably apparent in the older parts of the play. Note, for example, the following echoes:[14]
I. i. 2:
'Comets, importing change of times and states'
Marlowe's Lucan 527:
'And comets that presage the fall of kingdoms.'
I. i. 3:
'Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky.'
Tamburlaine 1922:
'Shaking her silver tresses in the air.'
I. i. 22:
'Like captives bound to a triumphant car.'
Edward II 174:
'With captive kings at his triumphant car.'
I. i. 36:
'Whom like a school-boy you may over-awe.'
Edward II 1336 f.:
'As though your highness were a school-boy still,
And must be awed and governed like a child.'
I. i. 46:
'Instead of gold we'll offer up our arms.'
Jew of Malta 758 f.:
'Instead of gold,
We'll send thee bullets wrapped in smoke and fire.'
I. i. 149:
'I'll hale the Dauphin headlong from his throne.'
Tamburlaine 4021:
'Haling him headlong to the lowest hell.'
I. vi. 11, 12:
'Why ring not out the bells throughout the town?
Dauphin, command the citizens make bonfires.'
Tamburlaine 1335 f.:
'Ringing with joy their superstitious bells,
And making bonfires for my overthrow.'
III. ii. 40:
'That hardly we escap'd the pride of France.'
Tamburlaine 140:
'Lest you subdue the pride of Christendom.'
Tamburlaine 3568:
'To overdare the pride of Graecia.'
Dido 482:
'That after burnt the pride of Asia.'
III. ii. 136:
'But kings and mightiest potentates must die.'
Tamburlaine 4641:
'For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die.'
III. iii. 13:
'And we will make thee famous through the world.'
Tamburlaine 2173:
'And makes my deeds infamous through the world.'
III. iii. 24:
'But be extirped from our provinces.'
Faustus 122:
'And reign sole king of all our provinces.'
IV. vii. 32:
'Now my old arms are young John Talbot's grave.'
Jew of Malta 1192:
'These arms of mine shall be thy sepulchre.'
V. iv. 34:
'Take her away; for she hath liv'd too long.'
Edward II 2651:
'Nay, to my death, for too long have I lived.'
V. iv. 87, 88:
'May never glorious sun reflex his beams
Upon the country where you make abode.'
Tamburlaine 969 f.:
'For neither rain can fall upon the earth,
Nor sun reflex his virtuous beams thereon.'
Marlowe's general influence is also traceable, as in I. vi, where the barbaric magnificence of the Dauphin's promises to Joan plagiarizes those of Tamburlaine to Zenocrate (Tamb. 278 ff.), and his promise that Joan's coffin shall be carried before the kings and queens of France recalls the second part of Marlowe's play (II. iii, III. ii). The concluding couplet of this same scene echoes the close of 1 Tamburlaine, Act III; and the burial of Zenocrate is again clearly parodied in the burial of Salisbury (II. ii).[15]
All this means mimicry, conscious or unconscious. Frequently the imitation degenerates into travesty, as in the weak mouthing of Bedford (I. i. 148-156) and the atrocious rot of the whole scene in which Salisbury is stricken (I. iv). Imagine Marlowe making his chief hero say at the height of passion:
'What chance is this, that suddenly hath cross'd us?
Speak, Salisbury; at least, if thou canst speak,' etc.
It is easier to conceive the mighty line to have attained the unsurpassable flatness of the messenger's words in II. iii. 29, 30:
'Stay, my Lord Talbot; for my Lady craves
To know the cause of your abrupt departure.'
The real proof that Marlowe did not write Harry the Sixth is the absence of any passion except in scenes which bear marks of revision. The lines are usually musical and sometimes charming, and the stage action is interesting, but they are not irradiated by the electric intensity that scintillates in Marlowe. Till Shakespeare vivifies him in the fourth act, Talbot himself is but a skeleton in armor.
2. Greene?
Greene has been very often suggested as the author of this play, most recently by Gray, though with reservations, and most positively by Hart. I see nothing that renders such an attribution reasonable: Hart's verbal parallels seem quite without demonstrative value. Greene's essays in the chronicle his- tory drama are notably characteristic, and evidence a method entirely unlike that of this play. He nowhere exhibits any tendency toward patriotic themes or any interest in the facts of history. Rather in his quasi-historic plays, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and James IV (and in George-a-Greene if it be his), he yields to an apparently irresistible devotion for pastoral woodland settings, romantic love stories, quaint supernaturalism, and clownish roguery. Unless one can fancy Joan's brief address to her fiends (V. iii. 1–24) to be akin in atmosphere or purpose to the magic humbuggery of Bacon and the fairy machinery of Oberon, 1 Henry VI is wholly unlike Greene in all these points. It is unlike him both in the inflexibility with which it harps on the historical note, and in its absence of humor, sentiment, or pathos. Greene, of course, may have written the play, but it is less like his avowed work than that of any contemporary dramatist.
3. Peele?
It is not by a process of elimination merely that I arrive at George Peele as the most likely author of the old Harry the Sixth play. Indications of several kinds point in Peele's direction. He was at the time the work was produced distinctly the most conspicuous exponent of jingoistic national pride—a trait of which Marlowe shows absolutely nothing and Greene hardly more. Peele had composed the patriotic masques to celebrate the Lord Mayoralty of Sir Wolstan Dixie in 1585 and of Sir William Web in 1591. His Polyhymnia (1590) lauded in martial strains 'the honourable Triumph at Tilt' when Sir Henry Lea formally resigned his post of Queen's Champion, and he again touched the same theme in Anglorum Feriae (1595), written in honor of the thirty-seventh anniversary of Elizabeth's accession.
In 1589 he had twice come forth as the spokesman of the nation: in his Eclogue Gratulatory to the Earl of Essex 'for his welcome into England from Portugal,' and in his fine Farewell, 'Entituled to the famous and fortunate Generals of our English forces: Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake.' Later, again, in 1593, he linked the knighthood of his age with that of the past in The Honour of the Garter.[16] His plays of the same period, Edward I and The Battle of Alcazar, are equally filled with the praise of English daring. No known author of 1591 has anything like the same claim on merely extrinsic evidence to be regarded as the author of a play in celebration of the martial exploits of the brave Lord Talbot.[17] General similarities between Peele's Edward I and 1 Henry VI have been often noted, particularly the unhappy resemblance in the defamation of the Spanish Eleanor and the French Joan of Arc. One of the most insular of Britons, Peele was incapable of glorifying his countrymen without slandering the races they opposed. The undramatic line put into Joan's mouth (III. iii. 85),
'Done like a Frenchman: turn, and turn again!'
is fairly characteristic of his bigotry.
The verse of the older portions of the play—saccharine rather than strong, and the loose but animated structure are what one finds in Peele's recognized dramas. The imitation of Marlowe is equally a feature of those which were produced after Tamburlaine.[18]
The Countess of Auvergne episode, with its grace and lack of human warmth, seems to me like Peele's work. In its relation to the military plot, and particularly in the military tableau with which it closes, it is very suggestive of the more elaborated Countess of Salisbury episode in the anonymous Edward III. I give my adhesion to the conjecture of Farmer, already quoted, that 'Henry the sixth [in its earliest form] had the same Author with Edward the third,' and believe that author to have been Peele.[19]
- ↑ Boswell—Malone Shakespeare, 1823, v. 246: 'I am therefore decisively of opinion that this play was not written by Shakspeare'; ibid., xviii. 557: Part I is 'the entire or nearly the entire production of some ancient dramatist.'
- ↑ Shakspeare and his Times, 1817, ii. 293: 'The hand of Shakspeare is nowhere visible throughout the entire of this "Drum-and-Trumpet-Thing," as Mr. Morgan [Maurice Morgann] has justly termed it.'
- ↑ Annals of the Stage, 1831, iii. 145: 'It is plausibly conjectured that Shakespeare never touched the First Part of Henry VI as it stands in his works.'
- ↑ Capell also should apparently be included among the believers in Shakespeare's exclusive authorship. In his introduction he anticipates and very quaintly develops the idea of Steevens's second sentence: 'We are quite in the dark as to when the first part was written; but should be apt to conjecture, that it was some considerable time after the other two; and perhaps when those two were retouched. . . . And those two parts, even with all their retouchings, being still much inferior to the other plays of that class, he may reasonably [sic] be supposed to have underwrit himself on purpose in the first, that it might the better match with those it belong'd to.'
- ↑ 'I can but give it as my firm and settled judgment that the main body of the play is certainly Shakespeare's; nor do I perceive any clear and decisive reason for calling in another hand to account for any part of it.'
- ↑ Note, however, the historian Gairdner's passing remark (Studies in English History, 1881, 65): 'I dismiss altogether the hypothesis which some have advanced, that the First Part of Henry VI was not really Shakespeare's. So far as internal evidence goes, if in ability it be not equal to Shakespeare's best, it is too great for any other writer.'
- ↑ This is the sense also of Maurice Morgann's wild obiter dictum on the play, referred to in the quotation from Drake above. He alludes to Sir John Fastolfe, 'a name for ever dishonoured by a frequent exposure in that Drum-and-trumpet Thing called The first part of Henry VI., written doubtless, or rather exhibited, long before Shakespeare was born, tho' afterwards repaired, I think, and furbished up by him with here and there a little sentiment and diction.' (Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, 1777.)
- ↑ See the Appendix on The History of the Play, p. 134.
- ↑ Holinshed reports that Talbot had 'not past six thousand men' (cf. IV. i. 20 and also I. i. 112), while Halle gives him five thousand.
- ↑ Two small points, which I have not seen mentioned, may have some bearing on the date of Shakespeare's revision: (1) The Mortimer scene, especially lines 67-81, sounds rather like a reminiscence of 1 Henry IV. (2) Margaret's vain efforts to make Suffolk attend to her questions and the retribution she takes (V. iii. 72–109) repeat Falstaff's tactics with the Chief Justice (2 Henry IV, II. i. 184-211). It is possible, but hardly so likely, that the sequence was the other way.
- ↑ Pembroke's Men are supposed to have sold these plays and others at the time of their distress in September, 1593—a year and a half after Strange's (Shakespeare's) Men produced Harry the Sixth. Cf. Greg, Henslowe's Diary, ii. 85; Murray, English Dram. Companies, i. 65. (I do not agree with Murray's suggestion of a possible connection between Shakespeare and the Pembroke company.)
- ↑ The clearest indication of an effort to prepare the audience for this new gloom in the close appears in the croaking speeches of Exeter, affixed to III. i and IV. i.
- ↑ Gervinus pointed out (Shakespeare, 2d ed., 1850, i. 202) that if the Suffolk-Margaret scene and the last scene were omitted, and the play left to close with 'Winchester's peace' (V. iv), it would have a conclusion much better suited to the chief content.
- ↑ The line numbers for Marlowe's works are those of the Oxford edition.
- ↑ Several of these similarities have been noted by Anders, Shakespeare's Books, p. 121. Sarrazin had previously mentioned the resemblance of Joan's appeal to Burgundy (III. iii) and Tamburlaine's appeal to Theridamas (305 ff.).
- ↑ This poem should be compared with Talbot's speech, 'When first this order was ordained,' etc. (IV. i. 33 ff.).
- ↑ Peele's favorite epigram, which he affixes at least three times to his poems, might well serve as motto for 1 Henry VI:
'Gallia victa dedit flores, invicta leones
Anglia, jus belli in flore, leone suum;
O sic, O semper ferat Anglia laeta (or 'Elizabetha') triumphos,
Inelyta Gallorum flore, leone suo.' - ↑
Edward I 954:
'It is but temporal that you can inflict.'
Edward II 1550:
'Tis but temporal that thou canst inflict.'Edward I 1165 f.:
'This comfort, madam, that your grace doth give
Binds me in double duty whilst I live.'
Edward II 1684 f.:
'These comforts that you give our woeful queen
Bind us in kindness all at your command.'Edward I 2800:
'Hence, feigned weeds, unfeigned is my grief.'
Edward II 1964:
'Hence, feigned weeds, unfeigned are my woes.'David & Bethsabe 12-14:
'The host of heaven . . . cast
Their crystal armor at his conquering feet.'
Tamburlaine 1932:
'There angels in their crystal armors fight.'David & Bethsabe 181:
'And makes their weapons wound the senseless winds.'
Tamburlaine 1256:
'And make our strokes to wound the senseless air'
('lure' in first edition).Battle of Alcazar 190:
'The bells of Pluto ring revenge amain.'
Edward II 1956:
'Let Pluto's bells ring out my fatal knell.'Battle of Alcazar 250:
'Tamburlaine, triumph not, for thou must die.'
Tamburlaine 4641:
'For Tamburlaine, the Scourge of God, must die.'(The line numbers for Peele's plays are those of the Malone Society editions.)
- ↑ Cf. The Shakespeare Apocrypha, p. xxiii.