his business in a way now foreign to anything theatrical. He did not trouble himself to compose a play in the modern sense of the word; there was no question of formally developed plot or situation. He simply went to Holinshed or some other conventional authority, read the narrative sufficiently for his purposes, selected - with disregard of detail, chronologic and other -- what seemed to him theatrically effective, and translated his selections into blank verse dialogue. Incidentally, to be sure, as chronicle-history strengthened, particularly in the hands of Marlowe and Shakspere, there grew up in it some very vital characters. We may best understand Richard III. or Hotspur, however, if we realize that, from the dramatist's point of view, their very vitality is a part of his effort to translate into vivid theatrical terms a patriotic story which he found in ponderous, lifeless narrative.

Translation, then, rather than creation, even the most serious writer of chronicle-history must have thought his task. If he succeeded in translating Holinshed, or Hall, or Stowe, into a form which should entertain an audience while informing them, he did all he tried to do. When we consider the chronicle-histories as originally meant to be anything more than translations from narrative into presentably dramatic terms, we fail to understand them. So much is clear. Less clear, but equally true, is the fact that an Elizabethan dramatist at work on tragedy, comedy, or romance, really regarded his task as identical with his obvious task when he wrote chronicle-history. He never invented his

plot, if he could help himself; except in presenting his material more effectively than it had been presented by others, he never, for a moment, considered himself bound, as modern writers of plays or fiction apparently consider themselves bound, to be original. He turned to novels, to poems, to stories, to old plays, as directly as to chronicles. When he found anything to his purpose he took it and used it, with as little qualm of conscience as a modern man of science would feel in availing himself of another's published investigation. Whatever the origin of his plot-history, novel, poem, story, old play - the dramatist treated it not as a creator, but as a translator.

it

So to Henry VI. As one generally reads it, — after Henry V., a chronicle-history far riper in form, seems grotesquely archaic. Approached by itself, however, it proves more powerful than one expects. To appreciate it, one must read fast, one must make an effort not to notice but to accept the obsolete conventions of a theatre which, with no more sense of oddity than Kingsley felt in making Hypatia speak English, compressed into less than eight thousand lines of bombastic dialogue forty-nine years of English history. After all, these conventions, though obsolete, are not actually more absurd than many of our own. We can learn, if we will, not only to accept, but to forget them; and then, by placing ourselves so far as we can in the mood of an Elizabethan playgoer, we may get even from Henry VI. an impression of grand historical movement. The times the play deals with

were stirring and turbulent. Historic forces, of one and another kind, were beyond the control of any individual; and in Henry VI., after a while, one begins to feel them, in all their maddening, tragic confusion. One feels, too, one hardly knows how, the lapse of time, the growth and the change which years bring. Strangely, unexpectedly, one finds even in this crudely collaborative old play the stuff of which real history is made.

An accident which helps this effect is that, as a mere piece of literature, the Second Part is distinctly better than the First, and the Third nearly maintains the level of the Second. In the total effect, then, the comparative crudity of the First makes it seem long past. Even this First Part, though, has a force of its own. Take the very opening. After the extremely human courtship of Henry V., which closes the preceding play, the consecutive and ranting laments uttered by four uncles of the infant Henry VI.,

"Hung be the heavens with black!" and so on

seem very absurd. We must remember, however, that they follow the conventions of a stage very different from ours, and that Henry V. comes about halfway between. If, remembering this, and remembering, too, the keen lyric appetite of the Elizabethan public, we liken these laments to those of the modern lyric stage, we see them in a different light. Sung in concert, with impressive music, they might still make a fine operatic quartette. Then, immediately, the tone

of these half-lyric speeches changes. Instantly comes the discord of quarrel,—a quarrel which is to end, after half a century of bloodshed, in the death of the unhappy Henry. This example typifies a fact which we must keep constantly in mind. At least in its earlier period, the Elizabethan stage tried constantly to produce, by purely dramatic means, effects which would now be reserved for the opera. Without understanding this, we cannot quite understand what a play like Henry VI. means. Appreciating the operatic nature of the ranting declamation throughout, and of such half-lyric passages as this opening quartette, we can begin to feel what power the play has.

In the Second Part, for all its neglect of the great dramatic possibilities inherent in the adulterous love of Suffolk and the Queen, there are two passages better than anything in the others. Both of these, in the folio version, seem at least Shaksperean, if not certainly Shakspere's. The first is the death-scene of Cardinal Beaufort; the second is the rebellion of Jack Cade.

In the death-scene we have a wonderfully vivid picture of dying delirium, from which we would not spare a word. In the Contention there is a mere sketch of it, which would seem wholly like a careless abridgment but for the change in a single line. In the Contention, the speech which stands for the famous

"Comb down his hair; look, look! it stands upright,
Like lime-twigs set to catch my winged soul," etc.,
1 2 Henry VI. III. iii.

is followed directly by a speech of Salisbury,

"See, how the pangs of death do gripe his heart."

In the folio, Beaufort's delirium is followed by a fervent prayer for him by the King, who is interrupted by Salisbury thus:

66

See, how the pangs of death do make him grin !"

from "do gripe his heart

do

That change to " make him grin❞— may not be a deliberate change by Shakspere's hand, but surely nothing could be more like one. It has just the added concreteness of phrase, just the enormous gain in vividness, which distinguishes his style from any other.

Shaksperean, too, seem all the Cade scenes,1 though clearly they existed in the Contention, and doubtless those that played your clowns spoke more than was set down for them. Though it be virtually in the Contention, however, the reasoning of the rioter who maintains Cade to be a legitimate Mortimer seems too like Shakspere's fun not to be his. Cade, we remember, declared that his princely father had been stolen in infancy and apprenticed to a bricklayer: the rioter confirms him 2:

"Sir, he made a chimney in my father's house, and the bricks are alive at this day to testify it; therefore deny it not."

What makes the scenes seem Shaksperean, however, is not so much any matter of detail as the general 1 2 Henry VI. IV. ii.-viii. 2 2 Henry VI. IV. ii. 156.