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.'[1] Such is the opinion of Coleridge, Gervinus, Staunton, Halliwell-Phillipps,
- ↑ 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
