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.[1] 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
- ↑ 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.)
