INTRODUCTION.

SHAKESPEARE'S career as a dramatist began when he was held to be only an actor. Revision of plays, to renew or increase their attraction, was a common practice of the theatre, and Shakespeare found his way into the full use of his art through work of this kind.

The Three Parts of King Henry VI. were placed by his fellow-actors, Heminge and Condell, in the first collected edition of Shakespeare's Plays. The list of his plays given, in 1598, in "Palladis Tamia," does not include Henry VI. But it does include Titus Andronicus, which is also contained in the folio of 1623, and in which there is no very distinct internal evidence of Shakespeare's touch. As an original dramatist, Shakespeare appears to have begun with comedies, and to have passed first to tragedy with Romeo and Juliet. His earliest original pieces may have brought a reputation that gave interest to work done by him after his first comedy had been acted. As he con

tinued for his brother-players the old business of retouching, when his name had come to be a warrant for good entertainment, it was associated

even with the slight revision of Titus Andronicus and with the Three Parts of King Henry VI., through which Shakespeare was to pass to his own larger treatment of the Chronicle Play. Of work done by Shakespeare as a reviser before he had become known for one or two good plays of his own, and when his name would serve no better than that of any other player to win expectation of good wit, there is no record at all, unless this First Part of King Henry VI., earliest of all, perhaps, by a few months, may be so considered.

There are two old plays, one of them called the First Part of The Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster; the other -which is evidently the Second Part of The Contention-called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York. These pieces remain to us as printed in 1594 and 1595. They give us the matter of the Second and Third Parts of King Henry VI. and King Richard III., and seem to give it as it stood before it had been touched by Shakespeare.

A section of the reprint of the First Part of The Contention will be found at the end of the present volume, where it will be seen that the action is exactly continued from the close of Shakespeare's First Part of King Henry VI. The continuation is so obvious as to suggest that there may have been another old play, now wholly lost to us, which had the same relation to the First Part of King

Henry VI. that we find between the extant old plays and the Parts that follow.

There is record in Henslowe's Diary of a play of Henry VI., acted on the 3rd of March, 1592 (New Style), and often repeated. To the great popularity of this play Thomas Nash referred in the same year (1592) in "Pierce Pennilesse his Supplication to the Diuell." Nash there said :- "How would it haue ioyed braue Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that, after he had line two hundred yeares in his tombe, he should triumph againe on the stage, and haue his bones new embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at seuerall times), who in the tragedian that represents his person imagine they behold him fresh bleeding." It cannot be proved, but there is no reason for doubting, that the play of which the great success is here referred to was the play now in the reader's hand, of which "braue Talbot," the hero, is the very popular type of a redoubtable Englishman, "the terror of the French," and in which there is a scene showing Talbot's death, with his dead son. in his arms, that well acted would move many to tears. There would hardly be any call for alteration of a play on Henry VI. that drew ten thousand spectators; and its date of production fits into what we know of Shakespeare's life and work better than any other.

Passing by the criticism that would fix several

parts of the play on the authorship here of Marlowe alone, there of Marlowe perhaps altered by Dodge or Nash, there of Peele, and there of Shakespeare, we may quote Coleridge's comment upon the opening lines of this First Part of King Henry VI., "Hung be the heavens with black," &c. "Read aloud," said Coleridge, "any two or three passages in blank verse, even from Shakespeare's earliest dramas, as Love's Labour's Lost or Romeo and Juliet, and then read in the same way this speech, with special attention to the metre ; and if you do not feel the impossibility of the latter having been written by Shakespeare, all I dare suggest is, that you may have ears-for so has another animal-but an ear you cannot have, me judice."

The First Part of King Henry VI. is a play complete in itself, that might, if it stood alone, be named, after its hero, "Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury." Its interest lies in the romance-figure of a steel-clad English warrior, who strikes terror in his enemies, whose name alone puts them to flight. This made the play popular, this and the sure appeal to English domestic feeling in Ta'bot's death, together with a young son worthy et his blood, father and son ringed in by armed battalions, the victims of the feuds and factions in the English force that left them so to perish. But while Talbot is the hero of the play, his adventures are

interwoven with signs of the rising force of civil discord, which is at last to leave him helpless in the grasp of death. Thus the play is a right prelude to the fuller story of the miseries of civil war. Though, it says, there is no man stronger than the Englishman, discord may ruin his strength.

The period of history covered by this play reaches through twenty-three years, from the funeral of King Henry V., in September, 1422, when the young King Henry VI. was an infant, to the arrangement of the king's marriage with Margaret of Anjou in April, 1445, when he was a man of about five-and-twenty. Talbot's death, which is brought into the play and made its most essential incident, really was thirteen years later; he fell at Castillon in 1458.

The First Scene of the First Act at once connects the mourning over the body of King Henry V. with the first indication of the feuds between Humphrey, Duke of Gloster, and Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester. Messenger then follows messenger with warning of perils in France; the third messenger, rising to a climax, tells of Talbot prisoner. The historical date of the first scene being September, 1422, the news brought of the crowning of the Dauphin in Rheims slips over the death of Charles VI. on the 21st of October, 1422, to the crowning of Charles VII. on the 27th of July, 1429; while the battle of Patay, of which