warns off those who came merely to hear the City abused extremely.' The previous dozen years had been prolific of plays upon Henry's reign: Chettle's Cardinal Wolsey; The Rising of Cardinal Wolsey, by Munday, Drayton, and Chettle, 1602 (both known only from Henslowe's Diary); The Chronicle History of Thomas Lord Cromwell (printed 1602, 1613); and finally, Rowley's Chronicle History of Henry VIII.: When you see me you know me, published in 1605, and no doubt identical with the Enterlude of King Henry VIII. entered (by the same publisher, N. Butter) in the Sta. Reg. in the previous Feb. 12th.1 There is little doubt that the writer of the Prologue had one or more of these productions in view. and the phrases above quoted fasten with peculiar aptness upon Rowley's rollicking travesty of history, with its 'bluff King Hal,' its unredeemed Wolsey, its London ruffians and watchmen, and its robust Protestantism acting as a solvent upon all Catholic virtue.

Whether written or not with a deliberate design of vindicating history from these dramatic traducers, there is no question that the Shakespearean Henry VIII. is far more true to the letter of history than any of his earlier Histories. No other preserves so much of the recorded detail of history. Its speeches are often little more than Holinshed transcribed in blank verse; its pageantries punctiliously reproduce his detailed and picturesque narrative. Holinshed was indeed for this reign unusually full and unusually authentic. It lay but a generation behind him, and

its motive undoubtedly recalls the Jonsonian habit of preparing his audience to see one play to-day as other plays should be.' But the schooling is conveyed with a courtly suavity which he did not affect.

1 Edited by K. Elze (1874). Elze held that the Shakespearean play was written during Elizabeth's reign-with subsequent interpolation of the allusions to James. This is absolutely nega tived by the style.

he was able to weave into his own work the first-hand reports of contemporaries like Hall and Cavendish. It is true that his sources were steeped in animus of very different shades, and that their parti-coloured hues give a composite and somewhat indecisive effect to his presentment of men. Holinshed's Wolsey is painted for the most part with the angry Protestant brush of Hall, whose Chronicle was suppressed under Mary; but we detect readily enough the passages transcribed from Wolsey's faithful usher1 (the valet to whom he was a hero), or from the Jesuit Campion's eulogy upon this great pre-Loyolan member of his Order. Nor have these dissonances been by any means effaced in the drama; indeed, they are even heightened by the addition of a highly-coloured Protestant patch from Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1576) -the Cranmer scenes in Act V.

As it stands, the drama presents a strange mingling of reticence and partisanship. We are invited to bestow our sympathies, alternately, on different sides, and are yet denied the definite information needed for judging, or even knowing how the dramatist judged, between them. Critics, according to their bent, have found it equally easy to exhibit the play as a manifesto of the new faith or of the old-a celebration of Elizabeth or a vindication of Katharine. Gervinus explained it to be a pæan to the House of Tudor; it may quite as readily be represented as a satire on them. Henry is tenderly, even obsequiously, handled; we see him as the magnanimous father of his people, intervening to remit Wolsey's oppressive taxation (i. 2.), or to rescue the pious

1 G. Cavendish's Life of Wolsey was still in MS.; but Stow had transferred its substance to his Annales (1580), whence the

material passed into Holinshed's second edition (1587) used by Shakespeare.

Cranmer from Gardiner's spite (v. 3.). Yet it is diffi cult to describe as an apology' for Henry, a play which draws but the flimsiest of disguises over the sensual motive of his suit for divorce. And note that the dramatist does not here merely follow the Chronicle; he deliberately antedates Henry's favours to Anne Boleyn, so as to emphasise their sinister bearing upon Katharine's fate. Thus the historical date of her sudden elevation to the peerage is 1532. But the scene representing this (ii. 3.), the only one in which she can be said to appear, is placed immediately before the scene representing the trial of 1529. The king's execrations at the close of this scene upon the dilatory sloth and tricks' of Rome, thus acquire a significance not apparent in Holinshed.

A similar ambiguity marks the portrayal of Buckingham, of Wolsey, of Anne. Was Buckingham the victim of Wolsey's unscrupulous policy or a traitor whom he justly brought to the block? History pronounces against him; but Holinshed, without expressly asserting his innocence, speaks bitterly of the 'forged tales and contrived surmises' which the Cardinal 'daily put into the king's head to the satisfying of his cankered and malicious stomach'; and the dramatist (who omits this passage) holds the balance so even that either view may be taken with almost equal plausibility. Each has, in fact, been assumed as obvious by modern critics of insight.1 In Wolsey's case the dramatist has not so much held the balance between two views as enforced them with equal vigour in succession. The psychological hiatus between the churchman of boundless ambition and the saint who only upon his overthrow 'felt himself,

1 Thus Kreyssig speaks (Vorles, i. 361) of the palpably false evidence' on which Buck

ingham is condemned; while Mr. Boas holds that his summary arrest 'is proved to be fully justified.'

and found the blessedness of being little,' is, if any thing, somewhat more violent than in Holinshed. On the most favourable view, it must be allowed that the fundamental features of his character are wholly suppressed until his part is played cut-to be then. suddenly announced, as in a funeral éloge, by the devoted Griffith.

Alone, among the persons of the drama, the noble and pathetic figure of Katharine is drawn with perfect. harmony and precision, and here the effect is due far less to any imaginative reconstruction of the materials than to a faithful preservation of the profuse and animated detail they supplied. It was not Shakespeare's way to abandon his authorities merely for the sake of asserting his originality, so long as they gave him what he wanted. Julius Cæsar follows Plutarch almost as closely as Henry VIII. follows Holinshed. But the fidelity of Henry VIII. is of a lower kind than that of Julius Cæsar; it is more literal and less imaginative; in a word, less Shakespearean.

No doubt the nature of the subject imposed enormous difficulties on an Elizabethan dramatist. To render with imaginative sympathy the moving story of the divorce, and yet to remember that the glory of his own time had flowered from that malign plant, was to be under a continual provocation to the conflict of interests which the play, as we see, has not escaped. Regarded near by, the divorce of Katharine was a pitiful tragedy; regarded in retrospect it seemed big with the destinies of England. Yet the earlier Histories had presented a parallel difficulty without involving a parallel failure. The glories of Henry V. like those of Elizabeth were rooted in a crime, but no such rent yawns across the tragedy of Richard II. as that which so fatally divides Henry VIII. against itself. After making all allow

ance for such obstacles, it remains true that the total effect of the drama is insignificant in proportion to the splendour of detail and the superb power of single scenes. Nothing more damning can be said of any play, and nothing like it can be said of any play which is wholly Shakespeare's work. Hence, in point simply of dramatic quality, the play justifies a suspicion that it is not entirely Shakespeare's work.

1

That suspicion was, however, first suggested by the more palpable evidence of style and metre. Already, in 1758, Roderick called attention to three striking metrical peculiarities of the play, viz. (1) the frequency of verses ending with a redundant syllable; (2) the unusual quality of the casura or pause within the line; (3) the frequent clashing of sense-emphasis and musical cadence.2 For him, however, these remained merely mysterious vagaries of Shakespeare. Nearly a century passed before the idea of composite authorship occurred to any one as the solution of the anomaly, and then, as commonly happens in such cases, it occurred to several minds at once- -to Emerson, Tennyson, Hickson, and Spedding. Acting on a hint of Tennyson's to the effect that 'many passages were very much in the manner of Fletcher,'3 Spedding read the play through with an eye to this especial point, and succeeded in demonstrating beyond question that two hands, if not three, were concerned. This division of the play between them was immediately confirmed in every detail by Hickson,4

1 The pause after two emphatic monosyllables, the first of which bears the verse stress, is common within the line, as well as at the end, and is very rare in Shakespeare. E.g. 'Remember your bold life too,' v. 2. 85.

2 Notes published in the sixth

edition of Edwardes's Canons of Criticism.

3 Gentleman's Magazine, 1850; reprinted in New Shakespere Soc. Transactions, 1874.

4 Notes and Queries, Aug. 24, 1850. Also reprinted in N. Sh. Soc. Transactions, after Spedding's paper.