KING HENRY THE SIXTH. The three parts of (King Henry VP offer some of the most complex problems in Elizabethan drama; and it is indeed rather as problems than as literature that they now attract most readers. Nearly all the dramatists conspicuous during the period from 1590 to 1595— Shake speare, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Nashe, Lodge — have been conjecturally associated with their authorship, but the many resultant diffi culties, like others connected with their respec tive dates of composition and precise relation ship to one another, are in large part still un settled.
The first part of 'King Henry VI' is ex tant only in a single form, that found in the Shakespeare Folio of 1623, but the second and third parts each appeared during the preceding 30 years in at least three different versions. Under the title of 'The First Part of the Con tention betwixt the two famous Houses of York and Lancaster,' Thomas Millington pub lished, in 1594, the earliest known text of <2 Henry VI,' a text containing only about half as many lines as that of the Folio. In the fol lowing year (15%), the same publisher brought out
Of the three plays as printed in the Folio, the first part contains fewest evidences of Shakespeare's work. Modern critics have been inclined to recognize his hand, with varying de grees of assurance, in the scene that depicts the plucking of roses in the Temple Garden (II, iv), in the next one (II, v) which intro duces the dying Mortimer, in several, at least, of the series of short scenes dealing with Tal bot's death (IV, ii-vii), and possibly in Suf folk's wooing of Margaret (V, iii).
More positiveness is allowable in regard to the second and third parts, where Shakespeare's hand seems perceptible in virtually all the ex tensive Folio additions to the text of the (Whole Contention' of 1619. Study of this added material, carefully inlaid upon the origi nal dramas, leads to valuable inferences regard ing Shakespeare's early style and mode of com position. That Shakespeare had any hand in writing the