Shakespeare and Others - The Authorship of 1 Henry VI

Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp DBA Associated University Presses
Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of "Henry the Sixth, Part One"
Author(s): GARY TAYLOR
Source: Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, Vol. 7 (1995), pp. 145-205
Published by: Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp DBA Associated University Presses
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24322413
Accessed: 12-08-2016 14:04 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/24322413?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp DBA Associated University Presses is collaborating
with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England
This content downloaded from 131.156.224.67 on Fri, 12 Aug 2016 14:04:02 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of
Henry the Sixth, Part One
GARY TAYLOR
MOST postwar critics, in defiance of a consensus that lasted for two ce

ries, have assumed that Shakespeare wrote the entirety of Henry the Six
Part One. This assumption has shaped more than our interpretations of o
(little-read) play: it has determined our views of the chronology of Sh
speare's canon, of Shakespeare's relationships with other Elizabethan pl
wrights, of Shakespeare's early theatrical affiliations, of Shakespeare's p
in the development of the English history play, of the unitary wholene
both the writing subject and the artistic object. Nevertheless, despite t
importance of this new orthodoxy, its philosophical and historical fou
tions are seldom discussed (least of all by its adherents). Therefore, bef
I attempt to look anew at an old problem, it may be useful to descr
however briefly, the birth and upbringing of the hypothesis that gov
almost all recent thought, editorial and critical, about this play.
The undisciplined authorship studies of the late nineteenth and early tw
tieth centuries provoked, classically, their own nemesis, initially in the f
of E. K. Chambers's 1924 British Academy lecture "The Disintegration o
Shakespeare." Chambers himself continued, until the end of his life, to d
Shakespeare's authorship of 1 Henry VI, but he discredited most of
methods of those who disintegrated it.1 In 1929 Peter Alexander's equa
influential book on the first tetralogy successfully challenged Edmond
lone's hypothesis that The First Part of the Contention and The True T
edy of Richard, Duke of York, plays printed in the 1590s, were the prim
"sources" of the plays printed in 1623 as Part Two and Part Three. Alexan
argued—and most scholars now accept—that Contention and Duke of Y
were simply corrupt texts of the plays which the Folio (posthumously,
misleadingly) calls Part Two and Part Three. But in respect to Part
Alexander simply committed Malone's own intellectual error in reverse
assuming that a solution to the problem of Contention and Duke of Yo
must automatically apply to Part One as well.2 In 1944, in Shakespe
History Plays, E. M. Tillyard confessed to a growing conviction that Hen
145
146 GARY TAYLOR
VI was entirely Shakespeare's. Ironically, Tillyard (who dismissed t

of nineteenth-century, Teutonic scholarship which had disintegrat
play) apparently did not recognize that he echoed the conclusions,
methods, of Hermann Ulrici, who in 1839 had asserted that all Shake
speare's histories were part of a unified grand historical cycle that only a
transcendent genius like Shakespeare could have planned.3 Like Ulrici, Till
yard provided no evidence for Shakespeare's sole authorship of Part One,
beyond his own critical interpretation of the play's themes—an interpreta
tion most critics now find seriously misleading. In 1951 Hereward T. Price,
in Construction in Shakespeare, argued that Part One was so brilliantly
constructed that only Shakespeare could have been responsible for it—a
thesis as irretrievably subjective as the earlier belief that Shakespeare could
not have been responsible for so inept a play.4 In 1952 Leo Kirschbaum
lambasted Chambers for his caution in continuing to express doubts about
Shakespeare's authorship of the whole play; most of Kirschbaum's essay
argues that the disintegrators must be wrong about Part One because they
were (apparently) wrong about other plays.5
But the fullest and most influential statement of the new orthodoxy came
in Andrew Ciarncross's 1960 new Arden edition.6 Although subsequent edi
tors have accepted few of Ciarncross's many emendations, which are the
foundation of his textual hypothesis, that hypothesis has nevertheless en
dured as a chief pillar of the defense of Shakespeare's sole authorship.7 Just
as John Dover Wilson had a lifelong weakness for elaborate theories of
"continuous copy" (that is, revisions carried out over a period of years on
a single manuscript), so Cairncross had a weakness for hypotheses that
posited the maximum of editorial emendation. By heavily emending the
texture of the dialogue, Cairncross produced smoother, denser, rhetorically
more sophisticated verse—that is, verse more easily attributed to Shake
speare. Moreover, the alleged need for such emendation, in the work of both
Folio compositors, "proved" (according to Cairncross) that the Folio text
had been printed from a manuscript prepared by a particularly incompetent
scribe. This hypothetical scribe was then offered as an explanation for pecu
liarities and inconsistencies in the text, which other scholars had seen as
evidence of collaborative authorship.8 Thus editors who have found
Cairncross's many emendations implausible have in fact discounted the two
key elements in his defense of Shakespeare's sole authorship. Yet editors
continue to respect Cairncross's conclusion, while dismissing the evidence
on which he based it.
As even this summary history makes clear, in terms of both logic and
evidence all of these studies are deeply flawed. They nevertheless proved
enormously persuasive, because they drew their power not from a specific
textual argument, but from the ideological energies of modernism. As a
SHAKESPEARE AND OTHERS 147
number of recent studies have observed, the New Bibliography was deeply
implicated in the modernist desire for a unitary author, a whole and perfect
consciousness freed of the constraints of place and time.9 This aesthetic
demanded that Henry the Sixth, Part One be the product of a single execu
tive imagination—and behold, scholars discovered that it was indeed what
they wanted it to be. Driven by this ideological imperative, the academic
community had by the 1960s come to believe that Shakespeare's unassisted
authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part One was "proven"; thereafter, critics
with no personal expertise in the scholarship of attribution felt obliged and
qualified to berate suggestions of collaboration as an "eccentric" reversion
to "old-fashioned" theories.10 The authorship of the play had ceased to be
a fit subject for scholarly investigation; it had become, instead, an article
of faith.
The faith in Shakespeare's authorship of the whole of Part One rests

upon three premises, the first that inclusion in the First Folio testifies to
Shakespeare's unassisted authorship. No one who accepts—as have most
scholars for over a century—that All is True and Macbeth contain passages
penned by Fletcher and Middleton will easily credit this premise. Like other
playwrights in this period, Shakespeare apparently felt no moral or artistic
scruples about collaboration: with varying degrees of reliability, The Two
Noble Kinsmen, The History of Cardenio, All is True, Pericles, Macbeth,
Timon of Athens, and Sir Thomas More all testify to this commonsense
conclusion." If Heminges and Condell chose to put a play into the 1623
collection of Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, we may be
confident that Shakespeare had a hand in it, but we can hardly decree, as
dogma, that his was the only hand.
We might normally go so far as to claim that Shakespeare had the main
hand: this premise might explain both the exclusion of Pericles and The Two
Noble Kinsmen and the inclusion of All is True, Timon of Athens, and Mac
beth. But the "Henry VI" plays do not constitute a "normal" case. In the
first place, by general consent they must have been among the earliest of
Shakespeare's works. All three plays had likely been completed by the sum
mer of 1592—thirty years before the plays were set into type for the First
Folio, and two years before Shakespeare's name is first linked with those of
Burbage, Heminges, and Condell.12 Moreover, for most of Shakespeare's
early works the Folio's testimony can be supplemented by that of Francis
Meres, who in 1598 listed twelve plays as examples of Shakespeare's ge
nius;13 unfortunately, for whatever reasons, Meres did not mention the
148 GARY TAYLOR
Henry VI plays. For Shakespeare's authorship of Part One we

depend upon a book put together at least thirty years after the
written, by two "editors" who may not have known Shakespear
was written. Finally, the inclusion of Part One can hardly be di
from the inclusion of Contention (= Part Two) and Duke of Yor
Three). If Shakespeare wrote all or most of Contention and Duk
then Heminges and Condell might have included Part One even
speare's share in it were minimal. I would be uneasy with the cl
Shakespeare wrote nothing in Part One, for that would amount to
denial of the Folio's authority; but in this instance the Folio can
only as evidence that Shakespeare contributed something to the
much must remain a matter of reasoned scholarly conjectur
equally applicable to theories of single or multiple authorship.
If we approach the study of Shakespeare's early work from th
tive of contemporary theatrical practice, multiple authorship mu
only possible but probable. Almost every writer for the public th
period began his career by writing plays in collaboration: Dekker
Chettle, Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Massinger, all—like many
ers—served a collaborative apprenticeship. Unlike most of these
Shakespeare could not even claim a university education as a qua
for the job.
As we know from his later work, Shakespeare did not object to collabora
tion per se. The fact that his most widely accepted collaborations all date
from the reign of James I may not result from a revolution in Shakespeare's
attitude to collaboration but from the relative difficulty of proof in the earlier
period. By 1603 Shakespeare had developed a verbal style so individual
and sophisticated that it can be readily distinguished from anyone else's;
moreover, the works of his possible collaborators—Fletcher and Middle
ton—have survived in sufficient quantity to make reliable independent as
sessment and comparison possible. At the beginning of his career, Shake
speare's style had not yet achieved such an unmistakable individuality;
few plays of the late 1580s and early 1590s survive; of those that do, a
frustratingly high proportion are anonymous. It should hardly surprise us,
therefore, that scholars have had less success in objectively distinguishing
Shakespeare's early style from that of potential collaborators, circa 1590.
Even if we knew, on the basis of something as reliable as Henslowe's diary,
that some of Shakespeare's early plays had been written in collaboration,
we might find it difficult to distinguish Shakespeare's share from anyone
else's (just as scholars have found it difficult to distinguish the contributions
of the four known authors of Henslowe's play Sir John Oldcastle).
In short, Part One's inclusion in the First Folio cannot be taken as evi
dence of Shakespeare's sole authorship, and a conjunction of historical
evidence suggests that it might be collaborative—even before we have

looked at the play itself. The first premise of the absolutists therefore col
lapses. Their second premise is that Part One was written before Contention
and Duke of York. If Part One is indeed Shakespeare's, it must date from
the most primitive period of his extant work; moreover, since the play can
hardly be defended as an original masterpiece in its own right, those who
wish to defend it have invariably done so largely or solely in terms of its
place in an ambitious dramatic trilogy (or tetralogy). If Part One postdates
its two companions, then the primitive style of most of it can hardly be
attributed to Shakespeare, and the "trilogy" (or "tetralogy") is an artistic
afterthought, not the product of the aspiring vision of a young prodigal
genius. Those who insist that Shakespeare wrote all of Part One must there
fore insist that Part One was written first. But since we know that spinoffs
from a successful play sometimes take the form of a dramatic prelude, rather
than a chronological sequel, the assumption that chronological priority re
sults from priority of composition is evidently unwarranted.14
In 1594 a play called The First Part of the Contention Between the Houses
of Lancaster and York was entered in the Stationers' Register and subse
quently printed in quarto; this play clearly bears a close relationship to the
Folio's Henry the Sixth, Part Two, and since 1929 most textual scholars
have accepted Peter Alexander's thesis that the quarto is a memorial recon
struction of the related text printed in the Folio. If so, however, it seems
pretty unlikely that the Folio play was, at that time, known as Henry the
Sixth, Part Two; the reporters can hardly have forgotten the title of the play
they were performing, and to identify a "Part Two" as "The First Part"
would bewilder the very people who might be expected to attend (or buy)
the play. Nor, as Clifford Leech pointed out, does it seem likely that anyone
in the 1580s or early 1590s would have set out to write a dramatic trilogy.15
The work which started the vogue for two-part plays, Tamburlaine, was an
artistic accident, prompted by the enormous success of the original play
(which "became" the first of two parts); in the years that followed, whether
an envisaged second part materialized always depended upon the theatrical
fortunes of the first. No one could depend on being allowed even two plays
to dramatize his themes—let alone three. Since the use of English chronicle
material itself apparently departed from theatrical tradition, the play's
chances of theatrical success must have been even less predictable. To have
planned a two-part play, drawn from modern English history, was itself a
daring and original ambition; to have set out to write a trilogy would simply
have been unrealistic.
An absolutist might object that Shakespeare, from the beginning, intended
to transcend his theatrical inheritance: historical norms cannot legitimately
bind him. But when we look at the plays themselves they seem to imply a
150 GARY TAYLOR
pattern of composition remarkably similar to the historical norm. A

Wilson pointed out in 1952, Contention makes no mention of Talb
when referring to the English campaigns in France; it correctly loc
timer's death in Wales, although in Part One he has died—onstage, i
fictional scene exclusively devoted to his genealogical importance t
claim in Contention—in the Tower.16 R. B. McKerrow, in the introd
the unpublished first volume of his projected Oxford edition of the
Works, noticed something else equally remarkable.17 In Part One,
tions of Lancaster and York are dramatically identified by wearing
or red rose: the play devotes one whole scene to explaining this sy
(Il.iv), and in two others (Ill.viii, IV.i) it becomes the focus of expl
matic interest. In Duke of York, too, the text often refers to the use
by the rival factions. But neither text of Contention gives any in
that roses are worn; indeed, the texts refer to roses only once, and t
instance is itself vague (I.i.254: "Then will I raise aloft the milk-whi
If the three parts of the play were written in their chronological or
should the author go to such trouble to initiate the roses symbolism
One only to ignore it in Contention (Part Two)—just as he ignored
and his own inventive dramatization of Mortimer? Equally remark
the plays' use of the name of the royal family, Plantagenet. In Co
this appears once, as part of Cade's bogus claim to royal blood
But in Duke of York it recurs fourteen times, mostly in relation to
his descendants; in Part One, twelve times, always in the same con
In terms of symbolism and nomenclature, Part One is closer to Du
York (= Part Three) than to Contention (= Part Two).
A statistical investigation of the plays' vocabulary confirms this p
Throughout the 1970s, Dr. Eliot Slater published a series of invest
into the relationship between unusual vocabulary and the sequence
position of the Shakespeare canon.20 Slater demonstrated a statist
nificant correlation between the recurrence of rarer elements of v
(words that occur fewer than eleven times in the canon) and the d
strable or probable order of composition. In terms of such vocabula
One has links in excess of expectation with Duke of York (22 percen
random expectation), Contention (19 percent), Richard III (16 percen
Andronicus (16 percent), and Richard II (15 percent). Likewise t
that in terms of their own vocabularies are most clearly linked w
One are Duke of York (23 percent), Contention (18 percent), Richa
percent), Titus (15 percent), Richard II (15 percent), and Two Gentle
percent).21 In both tests, Part One is closer to Duke of York (=Par
than to Contention (= Part Two).
In short, the available internal evidence links Part One most clos
Duke of York; some of it specifically suggests that Part One was w
later than Duke of York. The treatment of historical sources points to the
same conclusion. Contention makes no discernible use of Holinshed; Duke
of York and Part One—and all the rest of Shakespeare's history plays—
demonstrably rely upon Holinshed as a major chronicle source.22 This pat
tern of source consultation would be astonishing if the plays were written
in chronological order. Moreover, even the original title ("The First Part of
the Contention of the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster") echoes
the title of Hall's work ("The Vnion of the Two Noble and Illustre Families
of Lancastre and Yorke, beeyng long in continual discension for the croune
of this noble realme"), which begins with "An introduccion into the deuision
of the two houses of Lancastre and Yorke." Part One treats the historical
sources in a manner surprisingly similar to Marlowe's treatment of his in
Tamburlaine II: in both cases, in order to make a play from historical materi
als already exploited in another play or plays, the author was forced to
compound materials from widely separated dates, played havoc with any
thing resembling historical sequence, and simply invented a good deal.23
Both Geoffrey Bullough and Kenneth Muir recognize that, in terms of treat
ment of history, Part One drastically violates the Shakespearean norm;24
but neither notices its resemblance to another play from approximately the
same period, which we know was an unanticipated sequel.
Finally, two kinds of topical allusion conjoin to date Part One after the
composition of Contention and Duke of York. In a famous passage in Pierce
Penniless (entered in the Stationers' Register on 8 August 1592), Thomas
Nashe apparently alludes to Part One:25
How would it haue ioyed braue Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that
after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe
on the Stage, and haue his bones newe embalmed with the tears of ten thousand
spectators at least (at seuerall times), who, in the Tragedian that represents his
person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.
We know of no other play about Talbot (who would be a relatively obscure

figure, were it not for Part One), and few scholars have doubted that Nashe
alludes to the play that we know, in some form or other. This passage, in
itself, suggests that the play's success was a relatively recent phenomenon,
an inference confirmed, in 1952, by Dover Wilson, who pointed to a series
of links between unhistorical features of the play and events in the English
campaign in France in the winter of 1591-92. Cairncross, characteristically,
simply ignores this evidence; but both Bullough and Sanders recognize its
significance, and by any normal criteria of probability Part One can be dated
more confidently than any other play in the early Shakespeare canon.26
Although Contention and Duke of York may date from several years be
fore, we know that both had been performed by mid-1592. Greene's parody
152 GARY TAYLOR
of a line in Duke of York presumes its familiarity; no one supposes t

of York antedates Contention; hence by September 1592 both must
been publicly performed. Since plague forced the closure of Londo
aters in June 1592, both parts must have been performed before th
according to Nashe, so had Part One.21 Therefore, if the three pla
written in chronological orrder, then all three were written and pe
within six months. This scenario is not impossible; neither, howev
very likely.
Finally, as is well known, Philip Henslowe's theatrical accounts re
number of performances of "Harey the vj" by Strange's Men at the
the spring of 1592. The first of these performances, on 3 March 1
marked as "ne" (which usually means "new" but sometimes "newly
adapted").26 Most critics before Cairncross accepted this as a reference to
Shakespeare's play, and Hanspeter Born has recently reiterated and
strengthened the grounds for that identification.29 But while confidently re
futing half of Cairncross's hypothesis (on the play's date), Born unquestion
ingly accepts the other half (on the play's authorship). He is, as a result,
forced to advance the implausible conjecture that Shakespeare wrote Con
tention and Duke of York after March 1592, and that Greene's allusion to
Duke of York derives from memories of the play in rehearsal for a provincial
tour. Bom's reconstruction also, of course, forces us to accept that none of
Shakespeare's plays was written before March 1592. All these problems
disappear if we simply assume that Part One postdates Contention and Duke
of York.
That assumption also removes another difficulty. McKerrow's typescript
records a serious objection to the identification of Shakespeare's play with
Henslowe's. If Part One were the first of the Henry VI plays to be written,
it seems unlikely that Henslowe would consistently identify it by the name
of a character played by a boy actor who speaks only 179 lines (6.5 percent
of the text), appears in only five scenes, and does not appear at all until
IILi. "Talbot" is unmistakably the protagonist, not Henry. Yet, if Part One
were cashing in upon the success of two other plays on Henry's reign, then
it probably would have been called, by its author(s) and Henslowe, "Harey
the vj"; otherwise the title is misleading, and adherence to it by Henslowe—
who is notoriously inconsistent about titles—is especially surprising.
I would not here wish to claim that Part One unequivocally must date
from the spring of 1592 or that it must postdate Duke of York. But if we
consider the evidence of date and sequence without making any presupposi
tions about authorship, then the evidence clearly points to both those con
clusions. If we reject that evidence as "not good enough," then we must also
abandon any attempt to date the early part of the canon, for the evidence for
other plays is less consistent and less reliable than the evidence for Part
One. At the very least, we can say that the absolutists' second premise—
that the plays were written in numerical order—is not only unproved, but
also, in itself, improbable.
The absolutists' third premise is that works of collaborative authorship
are not coherent; since they believe Part One is coherent, it must be of
single authorship. Readers familiar with The Roaring Girl or The Changeling
or The Witch of Edmonton (to name only three of the many collaborative
plays of the period) will not find this premise attractive; moreover, many
readers of Part One would object, just as strongly, to assumptions about the
merits of its structure. In any case, Elizabethan plays were sometimes writ
ten by several authors after being plotted by one.30 If, as is at least possible,
Part One postdates Contention and Duke of York, then its thematic anticipa
tions of those plays called for no extraordinary expenditure of genius. This
premise, like the others, cannot assure us, or even encourage us to assume,
that Shakespeare alone wrote Part One.
It remains true that the burden of proof rests, as always, upon the disin
tegrators. If we can find no objective or consistent evidence of more than
one writer at work on the play, then we must conclude that Shakespeare
was that writer. But if we do find internal evidence of divided composition,
then nothing in the external evidence overrides or contradicts the inference
that more than one man contributed; indeed, much of the historical evidence
actually fits the hypothesis of multiple authorship better than it fits the
hypothesis of single authorship.
II
But what criteria can we use to determine the play's authorship? Previous
investigations relied heavily upon the evidence of verbal parallels. I do not
think such parallels are useless; but they must be used with care, and they
are particularly difficult to assess in the case of a play of this early date
allegedly written by a fledgling author, perhaps as yet overly susceptible to
imitation of his more famous contemporaries. It would seem better to begin,
not by comparing parts of this play with other plays, but by comparing
parts of this play with other parts of this play. Is Part One linguistically,
stylistically, dramatically of one piece? We know that five playwrights con
tributed to The First Part of Sir John Oldcastle (1599), but no one has
succeeded in identifying their shares. Nevertheless, we can disentangle
parts of Oldcastle that differ from other parts. We might be able to do the
same with Henry the Sixth, Part One—even if we were never able to assign
named authors to some of the perceived parts.
We can begin with a humble but frequent inteijection, which has proven
154 GARY TAYLOR
remarkably helpful in distinguishing the work of some authors. In

the first column indicates which Folio compositor (A or B) set the
lines;31 the second column gives the Folio through line number (T
opposite a line number indicates that the line fills the Folio col
that spellings in that line might theoretically have been influence
compositor's need to justify his type.
The alternating pattern on the chart cannot be attributed to comp
preferences: Compositor A set the run of "O" at 108-635 and th
"Oh" at 1276-1644; Compositor B set a run of "O" at 1995-2119, and
of "Oh" at 2282-2631; both compositors contributed to a run o
1995-2177. In any case, it can be demonstrated, from the two com
work on other Folio plays, that both habitually followed their copy
to the spelling of this particular word.32 Nor could the pattern of
result from any normal scenario of scribal interference: why should
have transcribed only act 3 and act 5? In fact, why should a scrib
ties coincide with literary divisions in the work of art, rather than
cal divisions (like the end of a manuscript sheet of paper) or fo
divisions (like the death or illness or absence of the scribe who be
ing the manuscript)? The pattern of spellings of this inteijection, i
suggests heterogeneous copy, with at least two and possibly more
work, and the distribution of these hands strongly suggests diffe
thors, rather than scribes.
In I.iii ("O") Winchester is a cardinal; in IH.i—IH.iii ("Oh") he is four
times in the dialogue identified by others as a bishop; in the sequence from
the death of Talbot to the end of the play ("Oh"), Winchester has been newly
made a cardinal, to the dismay of other characters. This confusion over
Winchester's rank might be due to authorial incompetence. But Ill.i—Ill.ii
and IV.vii.33-V.v agree in their treatment of Winchester and their spelling
of the exclamation; act 1 differs in both. The linking of these two features—
one orthographical, the other dramaturgical—makes it difficult to deny that
we are dealing with different "hands" in both senses of the term: different
penmen and different writers.
Another orthographical pattern reinforces the two already established. As
has been noted before, Joan's honorary epithet, which would be repesented
by the modern "pucelle," is spelled in the variety of ways in the play:
Compositors Spelling Frequency Reference

A Puzel 11 Act 1
A Puzel. (prefixes) 11 Act 1
B Puzell 1 II. i
B Ioane. (prefixes) 2 Il.i
Compositors Spelling Frequency Reference

A, B Pucell 13 III.ii-V.vi
A, B Pucell. (prefixes) 14 III.ii-V.vi
A Pucel III.ii
B Pucel. (prefixes) 4 IV.vii-V.vi
B Puc. (prefixes) 9 IV.vii-V.vi

B Pue. (prefix) V.vi
B Pu. (prefix) V.vi
The handful of anomalous variants can be quickly dismissed: "Pue." at TLN

2716 is a common literals error for "Puc.," while "Pu." at TLN 2726 occurs
in a tightly justified line, as does the single "Pucel" in A's stints (TLN 1567).
But the overall pattern is clear: medial "z" is used consistently up to Il.i
and never thereafter:
Puc Puz
I.ii-II.i 0 25
Ill.ii—V.vi 42 0
Since both compositors set both forms, the pattern cannot be compositorial.
Nor can it be easily attributed to scribal interference. If this anomaly were
the only one in the text, one might suppose that an interfering scribe was
responsible either for I.ii-II.i or for Ill.ii—V.vi; but such a scribal pattern
leaves the evidence of "O/Oh" and Winchester unexplained. Act 1 differs
from all other parts of the play in its treatment of Winchester and "Pucelle,"
and from large parts of the play in its treatment of "O." Whatever else we
conclude, we can hardly deny that the hand that wrote act 1 did not write
all of the remainder of the play.
Any other conclusions must remain less secure. We might be tempted to
dismiss B's unique "Puzell" in Il.i as a merely compositorial doubling of
the final letter; but this unique spelling variant coincides with the consis
tent—and unique—use of "Ioane" as a speech prefix, and the unique use in
a stage direction (TLN 733) of "Ioane" (rather than "Puzel" or "Ioane de
Puzel"). A compositorial explanation of all these apparently related features
is unsatisfactory. Since the name appears nowhere else in act 2, one might
legitimately claim that act 2 is as uniquely consistent in its treatment of
the nomenclature of this character as is act 1. Unfortunately, in act 1 this
discrepancy rests upon twenty-two pieces of evidence; in act 2, upon only
four.
At this point it may be useful to summarize our initial conclusions about
this interlocking set of three variables. The treatment of Joan divides act 1
("Puzel") from acts 3 to 5 ("Pucell"); the treatment of Winchester divides
156 GARY TAYLOR
O oh Scene divisions
III.i-III.viii 0 6 present
IV.i-IV.vii.32 11 2 absent
IV.vii.33-end 10 present
acts 1 (cardinal) from acts 3 to 5 (bishop); the treatment of the interjection

divides act 1 (consistently "O") from act 3 (consistently "Oh") and the end
of the play, from the death of Talbot on (ten "Oh'Vone "O"). On this basis
we must strongly suspect that the author of act 1 did not write acts 3 and
5, which consistently differ in all three variables. They also differ in a fourth
variable: only in acts 3 and 5 does the Folio text mark scene divisions.
These divisions occur in the stints of both Folio compositors, who also set
the three other acts (1, 2, and 4), in which no such divisions occur. The
presence or absence of scene division thus cannot be due to compositorial
interference or to scribal interference—unless we conjecture that a single
scribe copied out only acts 3 and 5. Like the other variables, the treatment
of scene division suggests the presence of at least two authors, whom for
the moment one may identify as Authors "Z" and "Y":
Z (act 1): cardinal/"0'7"Puzel"/no scene divisions

Y (acts 3 and 5): bishop/"Oh"/"PuceH"/scene divisions
Of course, this initial pattern leaves acts 2 and 4 unexplained as yet. Act 4
does not identify Winchester's rank; Joan does not appear until the end of
the last scene, after Talbot's death. If we treat IV.i-IV.vii.32 as a single
dramatic unit, then two of the variables which distinguish Z from Y (the
treatment of Winchester and Joan) are entirely absent, but the other two
point consistently away from Y. This pattern will be clearer if we look at
the variables in sequence.
We can hardly imagine a single author or scribe abandoning both scene
divisions and the spelling "Oh" in the middle passage, between two long
stretches in which he sticks to both habits. Whoever wrote IV.i-IV.vii.32,
it would appear not to have been Y, and on the basis of these two variables
might have been Z.
Nor does Y seem likely to have written act 2. Again, there are no scene
divisions, and Joan's epithet, on its only occurrence, is spelled with a medial
-Z-. Another feature that distinguishes acts 2 and 4 from Author Y is the
form of the name Burgundy. Compositor B consistently used the form
"Burgund-" (ten times); the name occurs in his stints in acts 2, 4, and 5,
but little significance can be attributed to it, since it may reflect no more
than compositorial preference. In fact, B never spells the name "Burgonie"
and he sets the "Burgund-" form in King Lear, Richard III, and Duke of
York, too.33 Compositor A, however, in Part One uses the form "Burgonie"
thirteen times, all in act 3; he uses "Burgundie" only twice, in act 2 (TLN
771) and act 4 (TLN 2185). Moreover, elsewhere Compositor A shows him
self perfectly willing to set the "Burgund-" form; it occurs in his stints twice
in Henry V (TLN 2817, 3363) and three times in Duke of York (TLN 2467,
2479, 2499). Unlike Compositor B, Compositor A does not seem to have a
compelling preference, and in Part One the distribution of spellings in his
stints coincides with a literary division, not a bibliographical one. Conse
quently that distribution probably reflects a difference in his copy between
acts 2 and 4 and Author Y's act 3. Whether that difference in the copy
results from different authorial preferences is as yet more difficult to say.
Act 2's treatment of Joan is unique; moreover, the lack of any clear prefer
ence for the spelling of the exclamation—once "O," once "Oh," both in a
single scene—also contrasts with the other acts. If we could be confident
that only two authors collaborated in the play—if, for instance, the title page
or an entry in Henslowe's diary named two—we would, on the evidence so
far considered, have to assign acts 2 and 4 to the author of act 1. But of
course we cannot be sure that only two authors contributed. Henslowe's
diary, the title pages of other plays, and the manuscript of Sir Thomas More,
all make it evident that several dramatists sometimes collaborated on a play.
We can already feel some confidence that 1 Henry VI was a collaborative
effort, that at least two playwrights contributed, and that act 1 was written
by a different man from the author of acts 3 and 5 ; we have some reason to
believe that the author of acts 3 and 5 did not write acts 2 and 4. Further
than that we cannot yet venture.
However, we can now turn to another variable, which again distinguishes
act 1 from other parts of the play. The use of "here" in stage directions is
relatively rare in the Shakespeare canon: outside I Henry VI it occurs only
twenty-four times in authoritative texts. A number of these may not be
Shakespeare's: four occur in Folio texts set from transcripts apparently
prepared by Ralph Crane, who was fairly free about rewriting stage direc
tions (Tempest 2009, 2141; Winter's Tale 1988-1989, 2164); another occurs
only in the Folio text of Merchant, where it presumably reproduces a mar
ginal annotation by the bookkeeper (TLN 1406: "Here Musicke"); another
direction in Folio Lear may have a similar origin (TLN 1405: "Kent here
set at liberty"). The direction occurs only twice in texts that are generally
believed to have been set from autograph manuscripts: the First Quarto of
Titus, II.ii.10, and the First Quarto of Richard II, V.v. 107.34
By contrast, in I Henry VI the word appears ten times in stage directions;
nine of these ten examples fall in act 1.
158 GARY TAYLOR
Here Alarum, they are beaten by the

English, with great losse.
(TLN 216-17)
Here they fight, and Ioane de Puzel ouercomes.
(TLN 306)
Here Glosters men beat out the Cardinalls men,
and enter in the hurly-burly the Maior
of London, and his Officers.
(TLN 425-27)
Here they skirmish againe.
(TLN 441)
Here they shot, and
Salisbury falls downe.
(TLN 539-40)
Here an Alarum againe, and Talbot pursueth the Dolphin,
and driueth him: Then enter Ioane de Puzel,
driuing Englishmen before her.
Then enter Talbot.
(TLN 587-90)
Here they fight.
(TLN 600)
Alarum. Here another Skirmish.
(TLN 629)
Here sound an English March.
(TLN 1617)
All these directions were set by Folio Compositor A, who nowhere else
reveals a propensity for adding such directions. Probably all ten therefore
derive from the printer's copy. Even if that manuscript was a transcript,
one cannot easily explain why the scribe, or a prompter, should have used
"Here" so insistently in the stage directions of act 1 but only once thereafter.
Scribal interference thus seems most unlikely to account for these direc
tions, which almost certainly reflect authorial practice.
Act 1 of / Henry VI therefore apparently contains nine examples of an
authorial habit rare in the rest of the play and rare in Shakespeare. Excluding
unelaborated exit directions, the Folio text of act 1 contains only thirty-four
stage directions; of these, nine include the unusual "here." This frequency
can hardly be due to literary influence: Shakespeare, or anyone else, might
remember and imitate the dialogue of an unpublished play, but the wording
of stage directions in unpublished manuscripts should exert no such influ
ence. Nor can the disparity between act 1 and the rest of the play, or the
canon, be explained by the pressure of context, for the relevant actions in
act 1 have apparent parallels in acts 2 and 5 and elsewhere in Shakespeare's
histories and tragedies. The only reasonable explanation for the distribution
of "here" directions is that the author of act 1 did not write much of the
rest of this play or much of the Shakespeare canon.
Outside act 1, "here" appears in stage directions only once, in III.vii. But
the author of act 1 does not seem to have written all of act 3, or even III.vii—
which, like the rest of the act, consistently prefers "Oh" and "Pucelle" and
is properly divided from the preceding and following scene. As the remainder
of the Shakespeare canon makes clear, isolated instances of "here" in stage
directions do not constitute reliable evidence of authorship; only their con
centration in act 1 of 1 Henry VI arouses suspicion. On the basis of "here,"
the author of act 1 (Z) probably did not write any sustained stretches else
where in the play, although he may have contributed odd scenes or pas
sages. He could hardly be responsible for the entirety of acts 2 and 4.
Other evidence confirms the impression that act 1 stands alone. 1 Henry
VI contains a larger number of verbs using the obsolete -eth inflection than
any other play in the canon:
Act Lines -eth
I 5% 14 (+1?)
II 486 4
III 474 5
IV 557 2
V 560 6
The play
for almos
from act
A simila
-ed infle
"conquer
Act Verse lines -ed

I 591 31
II 484 13
III 470 18
IV 557 12
V 560 14
Again, act 1 differs noticeably from the remainder of the play and particu
larly from acts 2 and 4.
Again, 1 Henry VI contains more such inflections than any other play in
the Shakespeare canon. The proportions below indicate how many verse
words occur in the play, for every example of the tabulated forms.35 In terms
of other early Shakespeare plays, the frequency of -ed and -eth in acts 2 to
5 falls within an acceptable range (although, noticeably, the only three paral
160 GARY TAYLOR
Play -ed -eth Verse words Proportion

1 Henry VI (I) 31 14 4761 154; 340
1 Henry VI (II-V) 57 20 15693 275; 785
Contention 50 13 20656 413; 1589
Duke of York 47 18 23277 495; 1293
Richard III 75 18 27862 371; 1548
Titus 69 10 19521 283; 1952
Shrew 68 20 16736 246; 837
Two Gentlemen 28 10 12692 453; 1269
Errors 34 5 12712 374; 2542
lels occur in Shrew and Titus, not in the other early histories). But act 1
differs remarkably not only from the rest of I Henry VI but also from the
rest of the early Shakespeare canon. These two linguistic texts thus corrobo
rate both aspects of the evidence presented by the frequency of "here" in
stage directions: that the author of act 1 (Z) did not write the rest of the
play and was not Shakespeare.
In another respect as well, act 1 is consistent with itself and inconsistent
with other parts of the play. As MacDonald P. Jackson has pointed out to
me, the contraction "ne'er" occurs eleven times in act 1 but only six times
in the remainder of the play (II.i.44, II.ii.48, IV.i.110, IV.v. 19, V.v.54,
V.vii.22). The figure for act 1 alone is higher than the corresponding total
for the entirety of all but three of Shakespeare's plays: Pericles (eleven
times in a corrupt text of a play apparently collaborative), Timon (eleven
times in scenes attributed to Thomas Middleton, but only three in scenes
universally regarded as Shakespeare's), and Duke of York (twelve times, all
in Il.i-v and V.iv-vii). Given this third parallel, the frequency of "ne'er" in
act 1 of 7 Henry VI cannot in itself constitute presumptive evidence of non
Shakespearian authorship. But the fact remains that the frequency is higher
in that act than in any other portion of the canon, and that the closest
parallel comes in parts of another play (Duke of York) where collaboration
was widely suspected before the rise of the same modernist orthodoxy
which insisted upon Shakespeare's sole authorship of Part One. Equally
important, the frequency of "ne'er" is another variable that distinguishes act
1 from the rest of Part One. Like "here," -eth, syllabic -ed, and the treatment
of Winchester, this additional variable cannot be attributed to scribal influ
ence; all coexist with other features (the spelling of "O" and of "Puzel")
that might, in themselves, be scribal, but that fall into patterns that cannot
be explained by any normal scenario of scribal intervention. None of these
features can be compositorial.
One other variable that distinguishes act 1 from the rest of the play might
Comp. A Comp. B
Act One 0
Act Two 8 2
Act Three 4
IV.i 17
IV.ii-IV.vii.32 0
IV.vii.33-end 10
appear to be due to the Folio compositors. Act 1 contains no round brackets,

although forty-two appear elsewhere.
Compositor B set more brackets than A—a pattern evident in all their work
together in the Histories and Tragedies, which demonstrates that B's greater
use of brackets does not result entirely or even primarily from differences
in his copy but reflects instead a difference in the degree to which B repro
duced copy punctuation. (See Appendix 1.) The gross figures for brackets
in B's work therefore cannot be compared with the gross figures in A's
work. But even if we consider each compositor's work in isolation from his
partner's, a clear enough pattern emerges. Compositor A, who set no
brackets at all in act 1, set eight pairs in act 2, and four in act 3: the complete
absence of brackets in act 1 therefore probably reflects a real difference in
the copy for that act. Likewise, although some of the seventeen pairs of
brackets in IV.i were almost certainly added by Compositor B, it seems
unlikely that he was responsible for all of them. The absence of brackets
from act 1 therefore distinguishes it from Il.i and IV.i, at least.
Three categories of linguistic evidence contribute a further layer of poten
tially authorial variables. In the uncontested parts of the canon, Shake
speare makes relatively little use of ye. If we exclude All is True and The
Two Noble Kinsmen, where the frequent use of ye corresponds to scenes of
suspected Fletcherian authorship, 1 Henry VI uses ye more frequently than
any other play in the canon. Of course, even if Shakespeare wrote the
entirety of All is True and Kinsmen (which is highly unlikely), they both
date from 1613, at the opposite end of Shakespeare's career from 1 Henry
VI. Moreover, the pattern of their use here corresponds to a division that
we have already noted for other reasons. Acts 1,2, and 4 contain only three
of the play's twenty-three examples of ye (once in Il.ii, twice in IV.i); the
remaining twenty all fall in acts 3 and 5. Again this pattern cannot be attrib
uted to compositorial interference, for both Folio compositors set material
in both the ye and you portions of the play; nor is it credibly attributed to
intermittent scribal sophistication.
In acts 3 and 5, which I have assigned to Author Y, 20 percent of the
second-person pronouns have the form ye; elsewhere, the proportion is less
than 3 percent. This distribution—like much else—distinguishes acts 3 and
162 GARY TAYLOR
Acts Ye You
I 0 32
II 1 32
III 9 35
IV 2 37
V 11 44
5 from
to have
Shakesp
to amon
other p
IV, whi
among
among
betwixt
between
Because
O—relat
of auth
authors
one sce
(ILiv); i
Shakesp
On the
cautiou
laborate
Z (act 1
brackets, here
Y (acts 3 and 5): bishop, "Oh," scene divisions, "Pucelle," Roan, "Burgo
nie," ye
X (act 2, IV.ii-IV.vii.32): "O," "Puzell," Joane, no divisions, "Burgundie"
So far, act 1 is the tidiest of these attributions. Although we cannot yet

identify Author Z, we can already assume he was not Shakespeare. On
the other hand, the two scenes most confidently and generally linked to
Shakespeare, on purely stylistic grounds, are ILiv and IV.ii, which both fall
in the work of the figure tentatively identified above as Author X. Moreover,
Shakespeare seems not to have numbered scene divisions in his autograph
manuscripts: none of the "good" quartos (or the "bad" ones) printed before
1623 contains scene divisions; within the Folio itself, none of the plays
apparently set from an authorial manuscript contains scene divisions. We
can therefore assume that the parts of 1 Henry VI that mark and number
scene divisions were written by one of Shakespeare's collaborators, rather
than by Shakespeare himself. Moreover, as we have already seen, Shake
speare (like Author X) made relatively little use of ye and preferred the
form between (Il.iv). Since the play's inclusion in the First Folio testifies to
Shakespeare's authorship of at least part of it, Shakespeare must be one of
Authors X, Y, or Z, and only the scenes so far assigned to X could possibly
be attributed to him.
In denying Shakespeare responsibility for act 1,1 have made no reference
to the quality of the writing; but I suspect few critics would regret the
suggestion that it be eliminated from the canon, for in crudeness of dramatic
and verse technique I.i-I.viii have no rivals in the First Folio. Of the first
speech (I.i. 1-7) Coleridge wrote:37
Read aloud any two or three passages in blank verse even from Shakespeare's
earliest dramas . . . and then read in the same way [this speech] with especial
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
have asses. But an ear you cannot have, judice. S. T. C.
More temperately, Marco Mincoff—in the most detailed and astute modern
analysis of the whole play's verbal style—concluded of act 1: "If this is
Shakespeare at all—and one may well be forgiven for doubting it—it is
Shakespeare from a period with which we are not familiar. . . . The whole
of Act I bears traces of the same primitive style," with a high concentration
of inversions, "especially the type with pre-position of the object in threats";
in this act too, "the 'learned' images come thickest." Mincoff tentatively
suggests, as a way of accounting for these deficiencies while "saving" the
whole play for Shakespeare, that Shakespeare's style "developed" phenome
nally rapidly, in the very course of writing this play.35 But—quite apart
from the extraordinary implausibility of this suggestion—Mincoff's scenario
leaves all the objective linguistic and dramatic disparities between act 1 and
the rest of the play unexplained. If we accept the consistent evidence that
more than one hand contributed to the extant text, we need not invent ad
hoc excuses for the poor writing in most of act 1, since we need no longer
attribute it to Shakespeare.
Mincoff not only distinguishes the style of act 1 from the rest of the play,
but also strengthens the case—in any event almost universally accepted—
for Shakespeare's authorship of Il.iv. He goes on to argue persuasively for
Shakespeare's hand in IV.ii and in the entire sequence of scenes dramatizing
164 GARY TAYLOR
Talbot's fatal siege of Bourdeaux (IV.ii-vii). Noticeably, Mincoff

that conclusion through stylistic analysis alone, entirely indepen
own evidence of the links between acts 2 and 4. Some earlier
ferred to relieve Shakespeare of responsibility for the use of c
Talbot's scenes; but Mincoff shows that they compare favorably
ard II, V.iii.70-136 and concludes, "It may sound like heresy to
Shakespeare never really mastered the couplet form; the fact t
the comedies, the rhyming passages in Shakespeare's plays d
beth and Cymbeline are so frequently rejected as spurious shou
pause" (283). Kirschbaum also points out (in one of the few convi
of his diatribe on this play) that the use of rhyme must have be
to set these scenes apart from the rest of the play, investing t
sense of dignified ritual and of appropriate dramatic climax.39
also, of course, the scenes that, according to Nashe, had such an
effect upon early audiences; our own distaste for them may wel
nistic. At the very least, I see as yet no evidence that would allo
age us to deny Shakespeare's authorship of these scenes.
Although the presence of at least three hands in the play seems
now, reasonably clear, attribution of some scenes remains proble
distinctions among act 1 (Author Z), acts 3 and 5 (Author Y
IV.ii-IV.vii.32 (Shakespeare?) may be secure enough; but IV.i and
act 2 cannot be attributed with confidence to Z, Y, or Shake
hesitates to credit the author of a scene as brilliant as II. iv with the bathos
of much of the remainder of act 2.
The general conviction that Il.iv does not belong, stylistically, with the
rest of act 2 can be confirmed by the simplest and most reliable of all verse
tests: an analysis of the use of feminine endings in blank verse lines. Shake
speare can be easily distinguished from all the other known dramatists of
the 1580s and 1590s by his exceptionally frequent use of such lines.40 In
my own tabulation of feminine endings in I Henry VI, I have excluded all
incomplete verse lines, rhymed verse, and lines in which the final word is
syllabically ambiguous (heaven, spirit, and so on).
The reliability of such percentages as a test of authorship diminishes with
the size of sample being tested; nevertheless, some contrasting patterns are
clear enough. The author of act 3 (Y) can again be distinguished from the
author of act 1 (Z): only one scene in act 3 achieves a percentage as high
as the lowest percentage anywhere in act 1, and the more reliable overall
percentages for each entire act (eight versus three) tell the same story. More
over—again, as with all the other tests—these two distinct patterns can be
clearly distinguished from a third, represented in parts of act 2 and 4. Al
though a certain range of fluctuation from scene to scene can be expected
within the work of a single author, the startling contrast between Il.iv and
Feminine endings
Lines (Percentage)
I.i 174 4
I.ii-iii 145 7
I.iv 82 9
I.v-vi 106 12
I.vii 38 15
Lviii 29 10
I (total) 574 8
Il.i 80 3
II. ii 59 3
Il.iii 78 8
Il.iv 129 24
II.v 129 3
II (-Il.iv) 346 4
IILi 195 3
Ill.ii-vi 128 4
Ill.vii 90 3
Ill.viii 45 0
III (total) 458 3
IV. i 190 6
IV.ii 49 14
IV.iii 34 24
IV. iv 42 26
IV. v 13 8
IV. vi — —
IV.vii.1-32 — —
IV.vii.33-96 44 11
V.i 62 11
V.ii 20 0
V.iii 29 0
V.iv 15 0
V.v 148 5
V.vi 174 6
V.vii 107 1
V (total) 555 4.5
the rest of act 2 can hardly be explained away: the percentage of feminine
endings in Il.iv is six times the average for the other four scenes, and triple
the highest proportion found in any other scene of act 2. Similarly high
figures occur in the Bourdeaux sequence of act 4. In the 138 blank verse
lines between Talbot's entrance at the beginning of IV.ii and his death at
166 GARY TAYLOR
IV.vii.32, 22 percent have feminine endings—a proportion strikingl

to the 24 percent in 129 lines of Il.iv. Even if we include the prob
ending of IV.vii, the proportion for the Bourdeaux sequence re
percent. For the 267 blank verse lines most confidently attrib
Shakespeare on other grounds (Il.iv and IV.ii-IV.vii.32), the overall
tion of feminine endings is 23 percent.
The use of feminine endings in blank verse lines thus usefully c
the distinctions already established between act 3 (3 percent), act
cent) and Shakespeare (23 percent). Moreover, in this as in other r
act 5 (4.5 percent) most closely resembles act 3 (3 percent), althou
contains more fluctuation from scene to scene than act 3. Neverth
the use of feminine endings makes clear enough—even if we had
evidence—that no significant portion of act 5 was written by the a
Il.iv and the Bourdeaux sequence in act 4.
Shakespeare also differed from most of his contemporaries in th
1590s in his relatively infrequent use of a strong pause after the fifth
of iambic pentameter lines. Ants Oras, in a statistical study of the
tion of pause patterns in the poetry of the Elizabethan and Jacobean
has shown that Part One is one of only four plays in the Shakespea
that contain more "strong" pauses (colons, semicolons, question
exclamations, dashes, or full stops) after the fifth syllable than a
sixth. The three other examples—Romeo and Juliet, A Midsumme
Dream, and King John—belong to the so-called "lyrical" period, wh
fit naturally into the curve of Shakespeare's stylistic developmen
One thus stands entirely on its own. In fact, it has the highest pe
of pauses after the fifth syllable, and the lowest percentage of pau
the sixth, in the canon. But no such disparity exists if we restric
speare's share to the passages that make extensive use of feminine
Il.iv, IV.ii-IV.vii.3
Rest of play
Strong 8
pause after72 4th
Strong 5
pause after30 5th
Strong 7
pause after21 6th
The "Shakespeare" passages produce the sharp "valley" pattern

clear dip between peak frequencies for the fourth and sixth syllab
teristic of Shakespeare's other work; the rest of the play has the
rupted downward slope typical of most other writers in the 1580s a
A similar contrast can be seen in the incidence of all forms of pun
Pause after 4th 82 398

Although the proportion of pauses after the fifth syllable is a little higher
than usual even in the "Shakespeare" passages, those scenes nevertheless
differ strikingly from the others, where pauses occur so much more fre
quently after the fifth syllable than after the sixth. This contrast in metrical
practice would hardly in itself disprove Shakespeare's authorship of the rest
of the play. But in terms of pause patterns—like everything else—II. iv and
IV.ii-IV.vii.32 are more characteristic of Shakespeare than any other scenes
in the play.
Equally suggestive of Shakespeare is the number of compound adjectives.
As Alfred Hart demonstrated statistically, and as many readers have sensed,
Shakespeare compounded adjectives more frequently and inventively than
most writers.42 Among the 3,846 words of II.iv and IV.ii-IV-vii.32, there
are fourteen such adjectives ("tongue-tied," "true-born," "blood-drinking,"
"air-braving," "rascal-like," "scarce-cold," "ever-living," "over-daring,"
"war-wearied," "noble-minded," "ill-boding," "bold-faced," "dizzy-eyed,"
"over-mounting"), or one for every 275 words. By contrast, the 7,988 words
of acts 3 and 5 contain only four ("over-tedious," "tender-dying," "fly
blown," "over-long"), or one for every 2,000 words. Excluding Il.iv, the
remainder of act 2 among only 2,063 words also contains four compounds
("new-come," "blood-thirsty," "Nestor-like," "swift-winged"), or one for
every 511 words. In respect to frequency and originality, act 1 comes nearest
to "Shakespeare" (Il.iv, IV.ii-IV.vii.32): act 1 boasts "subtle-witted," "mad
brained," "raw-boned," "hair-brained," "keen-edged," "faint-hearted,"
"high-minded," "hungry-starved," "oft-subdued," and "rich-jewelled" (ten
compounds in 4,809 words, or one for every 481 words). The proportions
in act 1 are not significantly different from those in the bulk of act 2, but
the compounds seem to me more original; certainly, acts 1 and 2 both differ
remarkably from the scenes attributed to Author Y, who is uninspired in
this respect (as in others). On the basis of compound adjectives alone it
would be reasonable to suspect that Shakespeare did not write the entire
play and to conclude that Il.iv and IV.ii-IV.vii.32 are the passages most
probably his.
Shakespeare's early predilection for feminine endings was so unusual that,
on this basis alone, an investigator would be tempted to attribute to him
II.iv and IV.ii-IV.vii.32. The play's inclusion in the First Folio, combined
with the internal evidence associating these scenes with Shakespeare, makes
such an attribution unavoidable. It may also be worth noting that, in the
scenes apparently by Shakespeare, "Orleanes" must always be pronounced
disyllabically (IV.iv.26, IV.vi.14, 16, 42), as it must also on the word's five
other occurrences in verse in Shakespeare (Contention I.i.7, Henry V II.iv.5,
III.v.41, IV.viii.76, All is True Il.iv. 171); in contrast, elsewhere in Part One
the word is usually trisyllabic (I.i.60, 111, I.ii.6,1.iii.26, 147,1.vi.37,1.vii.14,
168 GARY TAYLOR
36,1.viii.9, Il.ii. 15, III.vii.69), and only twice unmistakably disyllab

I.v.1). In itself such a pattern might be coincidental, but like everyt
it distinguishes Il.iv and IV.ii-IV.vii.32 from the rest of the play a
them with the rest of the Shakespeare canon.
Likewise, the play's titular monarch is called "Henry" consistently
play (fifty-two times), except in the "Shakespeare" scenes, where th
occurs only once, as "Harry" (IV.ii.4). Shakespeare overwhelmingly
"Harry" outside the Henry VI plays (114, versus 34). The sparsity
brackets in Il.iv and the Bourdeaux scenes also seems characteristic of
Shakespeare. (See Appendix 1.) Finally, the character of Sir William Lucy
(IV.iii, iv) is not present in any of the play's chronicle sources and played
no part in the historical events there dramatized, but—as editors hav
pointed out—a Sir William Lucy of Charlecote was three times sheriff of
Warwickshire in the reign of Henry VI.43 Only an author from that part of
Warwickshire is likely to have known of Lucy or to have wanted to honor
him by bringing him into the play in that way. I will therefore drop the
pretense of skeptical quotation marks and henceforth openly identify the
author of Il.iv and IV.ii-IV.vii.32 as Shakespeare.
However, the more confidently we identify these seven scenes as Shake
speare's, the more difficult it becomes to attribute to him the rest of act 2
or the beginning of act 4. On the one hand, for reasons already elaborated,
the author of those scenes—whom I will henceforth identify as "W"—can
not have been responsible for the rest of the play.
Z (act 1): O, Puzel, -ed, -eth, ne'er, no brackets, here

Y (act 3, most of act 5): Oh, Pucelle, Burgonie, scene divisions, ye
W (II.i-II.iii, II.v, IV.i): O/Oh, Puzell, Joane., Burgundie
As this summary makes clear, W is clearly differentiated from both Y and

Z. But he is also distinguishable from Shakespeare:
W (Il.i—Il.iii, II.v, IV.i): O/Oh, brackets frequent, infrequent feminine

endings, caesura after fifth syllable, trisyllabic Orleans, Henry
Shakespeare (Il.iv, IV.ii-IV.vii.32): O, brackets rare, frequent feminin
endings, caesura after sixth syllable, frequent compound adjectives
disyllabic Orleans, Harry
The treatment of the two proper names would not be significant in itself
The "Shakespeare" scenes prefer "O" by a margin of ten to one; by contrast
the author of the W scenes is apparently indifferent about the spelling o
the word, which appears twice in II.v and twice in IV.i, once as "O" an
once as "Oh" in each scene. But although the difference in proportions
appears significant, the contrast depends—like those in the treatment of

proper names—upon a very small number of instances. These three cate
gories of evidence have some corroborative force, but in themselves they
are not substantial. However, the difference in metrical practice clearly is
substantial: the treatment of feminine endings is one of the most basic, and
most reliably quantified, features of verse style, and pause patterns are only
slightly less significant. Both features strongly distinguish W from Shake
speare. So does the use of brackets: the 545 lines of W's five scenes contain
twenty-seven pairs of brackets (one every twenty lines), while the 431 lines
of Shakespeare's seven scenes contain only one pair. This difference cannot
be compositorial or scribal in origin. This conspicuous disjunction in punc
tuation, coinciding with an equally conspicuous disjunction in metrical
structure, makes it highly probable that two authors are involved. The con
trast in dramatic and poetic competence between the two sets of scenes is
equally remarkable, as I trust will be evident to anyone who examines their
style at all closely.
It will be evident that the pattern of collaboration that emerges from this
investigation involves a division of the play into five acts. Author Z took
the sole responsibility for act 1; Author Y took the sole responsibility for
act 3 and apparently wrote most of act 5; Author W wrote all but one scene
of act 2; Shakespeare wrote all but one scene of act 4; Shakespeare wrote
one scene in W's act 2, and W wrote one scene in Shakespeare's act 4. Plays
were written in five-act units long before they were regularly performed
with four intervals; moreover, we know—from both external and internal
evidence, in other plays—that collaborators sometimes divided their work
along such structural lines.44 The Folio act divisions thus seem to reflect
the mechanics of a particular process of collaboration.
Ill
The assumption that Part One represents an old play subsequently revised
derives ultimately from Malone, where it originates in his interpretation of
Robert Greene's attack on Shakespeare as "an vpstart Crow, beautified with
our feathers," which in turn is part of his hypothesis about the texts of The
First Part of the Contention and Richard, Duke of York. Malone's interpreta
tion and his hypothesis have been successfully challenged by Peter Alex
ander and others, but the hypothesis of revision has lived on. For Dover
Wilson, such revision was a lifelong obsession, and his continued adherence
to such theories in his editions of the Henry VI plays has tended to obscure
the otherwise considerable merits of those books. For others—like Mincoff,
Bullough, and Sanders—revision has become a way of saving the play for
170 GARY TAYLOR
Shakespeare while admitting its stylistic inconsistency: the play is

speare's but not all of one date.
I do not object to the thesis that Shakespeare might revise his ow
or even revise other men's work; but nothing in Part One demands
encourages such an assumption. Champions of revision usually assu
Shakespeare's revisions were designed to link up an earlier "Talb
with Contention and Duke of York; but on the foregoing analy
speare does not seem to have written most of the scenes that alleged
this purpose. Of the scenes that can be confidently attributed to hi
one (II.iv) provides a link to Contention and Duke of York, and the
such linking scenes were probably written by two different author
fore, if such a revision took place, several authors apparently under
but several authors apparently wrote the original play; indeed, as f
can tell, the same authors apparently wrote the "original" and
sion." Moreover, Wilson has shown that the Talbot scenes themsel
ably reflect events in France in 1591-92; hence the allegedly "old"
of the play must itself have been new in 1592. Wilson also noted that R
plays no part in the chronicles until Suffolk's wooing of Margare
hence his conspicuous presence from I.ii onwards cannot be disent
from the allegedly late interpolation of V.v. Indeed recent critics
object that such theories of revision ignore and distort the real st
and thematic unity of the play, which organizes much disparate c
material by means of a frame of reference (civil discord) obviousl
to the events of Contention and Duke of York. If—as in any case
likely—Part One postdates those plays, then its historically contr
artistically consistent links with them need not be attributed to rev
would spring naturally from the initial shaping impulse of compos
As an explanation for the links with Contention and Duke of York
is at once superfluous and inadequate. Nor does it fare any better
excuse for the play's stylistic unevenness. The apparent pattern of
tion cannot be explained in terms of Shakespeare's revising circa 15
he had written circa 1586-88. At least three, and probably four, d
hands can be discerned; only one of these can be linked with any
period of Shakespeare's work, and the pattern of their distributio
much more like common collaboration than any known or compr
scheme of authorial revision.
Theories of substantial revision, months or years after the original per
formances, should no longer be taken seriously. But in any collaborative
play—especially one that apparently involved four collaborators—we might
expect to find some piecemeal adjustments at a late stage of composition.
Part One contains a few examples of such adjustment. In particular, Il.iv
may have been added late, for two reasons: first, in order to improve the
play's structure, by the earlier introduction of Plantagenet, Warwick, and

Somerset, and of the dispute between the two factions; secondly, in order
to link the play prospectively to the two plays, already written and hence
familiar to audiences, on the rest of the reign of Henry VI (Contention and
Duke of York). Many critics have suspected that the scene was an inspired
afterthought; certainly, the subsequent action makes sense without it, and
Alison Gaw plausibly contends that II. v makes much better sense if it is not
preceded by Il.iv.45 Admittedly, proof is unattainable; but II.iv might be a
late addition, and if so Shakespeare's presence in an act apparently written
by someone else, in a scene wholly unrelated to the rest of his contribution,
makes rather better sense.
A late adjustment in collaborative foul papers could also account for the
omission of an "Actus Quint us, scene prima" somewhere before the Folio's
"Scoena secunda." What we now see as a continuous scene—containing
Talbot's death, the entrance of the victorious French, and the arrival of
Lucy—might originally have been planned as two scenes, which were subse
quently welded together. At least, one can imagine a rough "plot," or dra
matic outline, which ended act 4 with the death of Talbot, and began act 5
with a scene of French triumph. The scene's extant ending—"And now to
Paris in this conquering vein: All will be ours, now bloody Talbot's slain"—
certainly looks forward to the business of the rest of act 5. In outline, a
proposed scene along these lines need not have been continuous with IV.vii.
The Folio provides no exit for the Englishmen who bring Talbot and his
dead son on stage; though the French nobles and the audience see the bodies
(lines 45-50), Lucy does not notice or identify them; when Joan identifies
them for him, she describes them as "Stinking and fly-blown"—though Tal
bot died only forty-four lines before. Again, such inconsistencies or defi
ciencies do not amount to anything approaching proof of textual dislocation;
but given the fact that something clearly did go wrong in the act-scene
numbering hereabouts, suspicious minds may entertain the appropriate sus
picion, and cautious heads will not be too dogmatic about the authorship of
IV.vii.33-96, which might well contain the work of two different writers.
Such conjectures plausibly tidy up the fringes of the picture, and so long
as everyone understands their speculative character they do no harm. At
least, if proponents of revision had gone no further, their conjectures might
have been accepted as a credible if ultimately unprovable account of a nor
mal process of composition. But although Dover Wilson rejected the old
hypothesis (that Shakespeare adapted an old "Talbot" play in order to link
it with the other Henry VI plays), and furthermore contended that the play
had been a collaboration from the beginning, nevertheless he insisted that
the Folio text represents Shakespeare's revision of an original draft not by
Shakespeare. What basis could there be for such a theory?
172 GARY TAYLOR
The "evidence" to support this premise consists almost entirely of

parallels, or subjective assessments of the quality of verse. Where, i
which for other reasons seems to Wilson to have been written by
or Peele or Nashe, Wilson finds a passage of decent verse, he s
Shakespeare's intervention; where, in a scene he assigns to Shak
Wilson detects any verbal ineptitude, he suspects that Shakespeare was
hastily revising someone else's work, and that the underlying un
Shakespearean dross can for a moment be glimpsed through a crack in the
overcoat of Shakespearean gloss. In short, let anything good be awarded to
Shakespeare and anything bad be added to the opprobrium heaped on his
lesser contemporaries. I do not find this Manichean procedure trustworthy.
Verbal parallels might seem to offer more substantial evidence. But neither
Wilson nor anyone else recognizes an essential difference between parallels
with Shakespeare's later work and parallels with the work of other writers.
Shakespeare was an actor; even if he had not written a single line of Part
One, he would probably have acted in it an indeterminable number of times
over an indeterminable number of years. Scattered verbal parallels between
this play and others, known to have been written by Shakespeare, therefore
constitute wholly unreliable evidence of Shakespeare's authorship of this
whole play. On the other hand, unless W, Y, and Z were all actors, they
should not have been strongly influenced by parts of the play written by
another collaborator; such influence would be even less likely to manifest
itself in the work of other playwrights, who can have had no familiarity with
the play beyond that arising from the memory of a visit to a performance.
Hence, although verbal parallels between Shakespeare's acknowledged
works and an early play performed by Shakespeare's company cannot be
taken as evidence of Shakespeare's authorship, significant clusters of genu
ine parallels between the works of other playwrights and passages in an
early play in the Shakespeare canon may point to the presence or identity
of a collaborator.
IV
Significant quantities of nonsense have been generated by scholars intent

on assigning names to Shakespeare's collaborators in Part One; moreover,
the nonsense has not even had the tact to be consistent, for nobody seems
to agree with anybody else. Absolutists occasionally point to this disarray
as an indictment of the whole enterprise. But for a play of this period we
might well be able to identify the presence of a number of different collabora
tors, without knowing their names. Moreover, the investigation of author
ship is, like other kinds of scholarship, progressive. Critical opinions may
or may not become obsolete; scholarly judgments do. The fact that Dover
Wilson (1952) disagrees in certain respects with H. C. Hart (1909) and Fleay
(1886) does not discredit Wilson; he has learned from and sorted through
the evidence accumulated by his predecessors, added to it, and offered a
new synthesis. In fact, Fleay, on the basis of nothing more than critical
acumen, attributed Il.iv and Talbot's death sequence (IV.ii-IV.vii) to Shake
speare; so in whole or part has almost every subsequent investigator. Even
in the early 1590s, Shakespeare's style may be more easily detected than
we might imagine. The disagreements have arisen mostly over the identifi
cation and discrimination of his collaborators.
Fleay assigned part of the play to Thomas Lodge, largely because of the
phrase "cooling card," which he had found only in Lodge's work; Hart listed
examples of the same phrse in dozens of other plays and pamphlets.46 Fleay
regarded the spelling distinction between "Ioane" and "lone" as a significant
authorial variant; Hinman demonstrated (incidentally, and without even be
ing aware of the significance of his conclusions for the authorship debate)
that the pages in which "Ioane" occurs were set by Compositor A, and the
pages on which "lone" occurs by Compositor B.47 Hence, Hart and Hinman
have turned Fleay's opinions—insofar as they were based on such evi
dence—into historical curiosities. In 1926 Gaw assigned parts of Part One
to Marlowe, largely on the basis of verbal parallels with the 1590s editions
of The First Part of the Contention and Richard, Duke of York, which he
believed to be early Marlowe plays, later refashioned by Shakespeare to
form Henry the Sixth, Part Two and Part Three; in 1929 Alexander toppled
Gaw's assumptions about Contention and Duke of York, and with them his
evidence of Marlowe's hand in Part One. No work of science or scholarship
can be immune to such reevaluation in the light of subsequent discoveries.
We know the names of only twelve playwrights writing for the public
theaters in the period between 1580 and 1595: Henry Chettle, Robert
Greene, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, Anthony Mun
day, Thomas Nashe, George Peele, Henry Porter, William Shakespeare,
Robert Wilson, and Robert Yarington (who may be only a scribe). If we
accept that Part One was written between late 1591 and June 1592, we can
eliminate both Chettle and Lodge from this list of potential candidates.
Lodge left England on 26 August 1591, not returning until 11 June 1593;
Chettle knew nothing of Shakespeare, personally or as a writer, until late
1592.48 Of the remaining ten names, one can already be clearly identified in
the play (Shakespeare). Consequently, if we assign names to Shakespeare's
apparent collaborators, three of the remaining nine known playwrights must
be present in the play. But twenty-one of the sixty-one extant public theater
plays written between 1580 and 1595 remain anonymous; for all we know,
each might have been written by a different author. Certainly, for purposes
174 GARY TAYLOR
of identification we must initially assume that each anonymous pl

different author.49 This assumption leaves us with thirty availabl
dates, of which only nine can be named.
Few of the criteria which enable us to distinguish four hands in P
can help us to trace them in other plays. Many of the variables do n
outside this play. Others, like "O" and "Oh," occur often; but such
variable only divides the class of potential authors into two sets—
any case can only be properly evaluated when the possible influ
compositors and scribes has been thoroughly investigated.
However, one variable in Part One should be of immediate use in at
identities to Shakespeare's three anonymous collaborators in Part O
frequent use of "here" in stage directions. Dover Wilson pointed o
"here" also occurs nine times in the stage directions of Thomas Na
only undoubted surviving play, Summer's Last Will and Testament
Nashe's play contains only twenty-three directions, other than une
exits; so that, although the nine parallel directions are spread over
area of text (a whole play, rather than a single act), they represent a sim
large proportion of the total number of stage directions. No other p
ten between 1580 and 1595 bears such a close resemblance to act 1 of Part
One in its treatment of stage directions. The anonymous Arden of Faver
sham uses "Here" in all but two of its fifty-odd directions—an obsessive
frequency unique to the texts I have examined. In the anonymous Pedlars
Prophecy, the word appears in eight of the play's fifteen directions—but
three of these are Latin {Hie: 375, 461, 990), while another three use the
formula "Here enters" (1194, 1211, 1410), which nowhere appears in Nashe
or Part One.50 In other plays of the period—as in the Shakespeare canon—
"here" rarely occurs in stage directions. The unusual form of stage directions
in act 1 thus provides better evidence for Nashe's authorship than Dover
Wilson realized.
Wilson's attribution to Nashe has been seriously challenged only once,
by C. B. Harlow.51 Harlow first argues that the linguistic evidence tells
against Nashe. One of the parallels with Nashe's work to which Wilson drew
attention was the word "Otherwhiles" (TLN 201), which occurs nine times
in Nashe, but never elsewhere in Shakespeare. Harlow points out (270) that
in Nashe it is always singular in form ("otherwhile"). This observation effec
tively neutralizes the value of Wilson's parallel, but in itself hardly amounts
to reliable evidence of authorship: occasional single anomalies in linguistic
features of this kind occur in the work of almost all writers, and any com
positor or scribe could be guilty of deliberately or accidentally altering such
forms. Harlow's other piece of negative linguistic evidence—the form of the
past tense of take in verse—is even more wobbly, depending on only two
passages in Nashe's acknowledged work. Clearly, such linguistic "evidence"

tells us nothing about whether Nashe did or did not write act 1.
Harlow also argues that the classical imagery of the passage points away
from Nashe. In Part One there are "nine" ancient sybils (TLN 256); other
writers identify "ten"; Nashe, in his only enumeration of them, specifies
"seven"—a figure which apparently occurs nowhere else. Either Nashe did
not write act 1 of Part One (as Harlow concludes), or (as is equally likely)
Nashe had no clear idea of how many sybils there were, or the "seven" of
that other passage is itself a textual error. For another passage in act 1,
alluding to the coffer in which Alexander the Great carried the works of
Homer (TLN 666-68), parallels have been cited from North, Puttenham,
and Nashe; Harlow alleges that Part One draws primarily upon North, and
claims that the use of North's translation of Plutarch points to Shakespeare.
In the first place, we have no reason to believe that Shakespeare had read
North by 1592; in the second place, the parallel passage in Nashe is the
only one which, like Part One, specifies that the coffer is "carried before"
Alexander. Harlowe's full discussion of the sources here actually strength
ens the force of the parallel with Nashe.52
Harlow's tactics of attrition usefully limit and define the reliability of some
of Wilson's verbal parallels, without in any way denying or contradicting
the bulk of his case. Part of Wilson's case is based upon the clear use, in act
1, of unusual sources, upon which Nashe is known to have drawn elsewhere.
Harlow recognizes that such parallels provide some of Wilson's most strik
ing evidence, and he seeks to undermine it in two ways. First, he argues
that Shakespeare himself knew one of these sources, Henry Howard's A
Defensative against the Poison of Supposed Prophecies (1583). Harlow dis
cerns evidence of this work in Hamlet (1600), Macbeth (1606), and Antony
and Cleopatra (1606-7).53 The alleged use of Howard in Hamlet is very
dubious, depending on the emendation of a single phrase which might have
been common, or which Shakespeare might have taken over from the lost
Ur-Hamlet; by contrast, the indebtedness in Macbeth and Antony seems
almost certain. Nor is it surprising that Shakespeare, in writing a group of
plays much concerned with prophecy, should have turned to Howard's
book, circa 1606. But these two Howard parallels come from plays written
long before 1 Henry VI; Nashe, by contrast, made extensive use of Howard
in 1592-96. An echo of this source in 1592 would not in itself rule out
Shakespeare's authorship, but if we must choose between Nashe and Shake
speare, Nashe on this basis has a stronger claim. (And, of course, this is not
our only evidence for Nashe here.)
Harlow, as if in recognition of the weakness of this half of his pincer
movement, lays much greater stress upon his alternative argument that
Nashe did not make extensive use of Howard until later in 1592, or early in
176 GARY TAYLOR
1593. This argument depends upon Harlowe's own speculative redat

one of Nashe's pamphlets.54 If we accept Harlow's dates, then
Nashe's use of Howard fits a pattern recognizable in Nashe's treatment
of other sources: a burst of heavy quotation, followed by a gradually de
scending curve, as Nashe exhausted the stock of his notes. But there are
exceptions, and one of Nashe's allusions to Howard cannot be dated later
than December 1592, as Harlow admits; moreover, Part One itself only
contains a single echo of Howard's book. Whoever wrote act 1 of 1 Henry
VI clearly, like Nashe in 1592, knew of Howard's book; he must at least
have dipped into it, but he need not have read or absorbed it thoroughly.
The fact that Part One's echo of Howard may have been written several
months earlier than Nashe's wholesale pillaging of the book for The Terrors
of the Night hardly constitutes evidence that Nashe could not have written
act 1. The absurdity of this argument against Nashe is apparent if we com
pare it with Harlow's argument in favor of Shakespeare: Shakespeare wrote
act 1 (because he echoed Howard ten to fifteen years later) but Nashe could
not have written act 1 (because most of his many echoes of Howard were
allegedly written a few months after Part One).
Again, Harlow's argument slightly weakens Wilson's case for Nashe, but
still leaves Nashe as a more probable candidate than Shakespeare (or any
other dramatist). But the echo of Howard is in any case less important to
Wilson's attribution than a clear echo (TLN 195-96; 1.2.1-2) of a passage
in Cornelius Agrippa's De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum—"a work
that stood perpetually at Nashe's elbow," as Harlow himself says (280).
Nashe echoes the same passage in Agrippa elsewhere; no one has identified
any other echoes of Agrippa in the Shakespeare canon, and even Harlow
concedes that "The dramatist cannot have been borrowing from Nashe,
because the latter did not commit the passage to print until 1596, and I have
been unable to find any other work in which the same idea is expressed in
words at all similar" (280).
Like Nashe, the author of act 1 borrows from Agrippa (Shakespeare
doesn't), alludes to Froissart (Shakespeare doesn't), had by 1592 read How
ard's Defensative (Shakespeare hadn't), and often used "here" in stage direc
tions (Shakespeare didn't). Nashe's only extant complete play, Summer's
Last Will and Testament, which like Part One probably dates from 1592,
also displays the same linguistic preferences as act 1 of Part One: it prefers
"O" (twenty-three, to one "Oh"), "amongst" (three; zero "among"), and
"betwixt" (three; two "between"), while making exceptionally frequent use
of "ne'er" (eleven times) and entirely avoiding "ye." Summer's Last Will
uses syllabic -ed more frequently than any play in the Shakespeare canon,
except Part One (thirty-six examples in 978 verse lines, or circa 8,683 verse
words: one -ed for every 241 words). Nashe also, like the author of act 1 of
Part One, makes exceptionally frequent use of the obsolete -eth inflexion:
forty-seven examples in verse (one -eth for every 185 verse words) and
sixty-six altogether (one -eth for every 259 words).55 The linguistic profile
of act 1 fits Nashe as perfectly as it consistently departs from the preferences
of Shakespeare and the preferences evident in the rest of Part One. Nashe
also had a vocabulary range and a capacity for verbal invention equalled
only by Shakespeare in this period.56 Nashe also makes the earliest known
reference to Part One. Moreover, as Wilson showed, Nashe echoed phrases
from act 1 in works of his own written in 1592.
All the evidence so far accumulated is quantifiable and verifiable. But
subjective judgments of the quality and character of Nashe's style are, I
believe, equally telling. In a bizarre, rare, and forgotten book, Shakespeare
and Tom Nashe (Stirling, 1935), Archibald Slater suggested—in the midst
of a welter of embarrassing speculation—that Nashe wrote all of the extant
text of act 1 of Part One. This conclusion was reached on the basis of
nothing more than an analysis of the characteristics (chiefly the faults) of
Nashe's verse. In itself, Slater's conjecture would hardly be worth recording,
though Slater should be given credit for having anticipated Wilson. But in
his unpublished introduction to Part One, R. B. McKerrow—who probably
knew Nashe's work better than any scholar in this century, and who was at
the same time deeply skeptical about attempts to "disintegrate" the Shake
speare canon—commented upon Slater's work. McKerrow accepted, purely
on grounds of style, that Nashe was the likeliest candidate ever advanced
as part-author of the play. McKerrow's endorsement of Stirling's judgment
of Nashe's verse style provides a comforting confirmation that the statistics
are compatible with the intuitions of a practiced and perceptive reader.57
The earlier part of this essay has shown, I hope and believe, that the
author of act 1 of Part One did not write the rest of the play, and did not
write the rest of the Shakespeare canon.58 Cumulatively, the internal evi
dence for identifying the author of that act with Thomas Nashe is so multi
faceted, so consistent, and so strong, that he should hereafter be recognized
as a collaborator, with as much right to a share of the title page as Fletcher
in The Two Noble Kinsmen and All is True, as Middleton in Timon of Athens,
as Wilkins in Pericles. If Nashe did not write act 1, then it must have been
written by another dramatist of the early 1590s whose works have utterly
perished, and whose works were in every respect indistinguishable from
Nashe's own. I will therefore drop the pretense of identifying the author of
act 1 as "Z," and henceforth openly identify him as Nashe.
The identity of the authors W and Y is, unfortunately, not so obvious.
The only feature of either contribution to Part One sufficiently unusual to
serve as a starting point in a manhunt is the literary marking of scene divi
sions in act 3 and most of act 5. I have found only three plays of the period
178 GARY TAYLOR
1580-95 which provide parallels: Tamburlaine I, Tamburlaine II

Locrine.
No one should regard Marlowe as a serious candidate for the authorship

of these parts of Part One. Even Gaw, who advocated Marlowe's presence,
could find almost no evidence to support it anywhere, and certainly not
throughout the two acts in question. F. G. Hubbard, in an article of 1905,
demonstrated that Part One—like Contention and Duke of York—has "in
marked degree these same Senecan characteristics" (of certain well-defined
kinds of repetition and verbal parallelism) "that are absent from Marlowe's
work."59
If we eliminate Marlowe as a serious candidate, then Locrine represents
the only extant parallel from this period for the act-scene divisions in Y's
portion of Part One. Locrine was published in 1595 with a title page alleging
that the play had been "Newly set foorth, ouerseen and corrected, / By
W.S." No one believes that Shakespeare wrote Locrine, but the title page
might be understood to mean that he saw it through the press, perhaps after
the death of its unknown author; it would therefore not be entirely surprising
to find some earlier link between Shakespeare and the author of Locrine.
The printer of Locrine on occasion misunderstood scene numbers as act
numbers—as apparently also happened in act 5 of Part One.60 Curiously,
Hubbard, in his study of rhetorical patterns in Elizabethan drama, noted
that his second category ("Repetition of a word or words with an added
epithet") was "comparatively rare"; he found examples only in Locrine (ten),
Peele (eighteen), and 1 Henry VI (III.vii.50).61
The date and authorship of Locrine are themselves problematic, and these
apparent connections with the work of Author Y in Part One may be fortu
itous. Moreover, one must concede that the marking of scene divisions can
not be relied upon as a sure clue to authorship; scene numbers might be
ignored by some scribes (particularly those working in the theater) or by
some authors making a fair copy of a collaborative play. Such factors cannot
explain the pattern of scene divisions in the Folio text of I Henry VI, but
they might easily explain the wholesale absence of such an idiosyncratic
feature in some early quartos or manuscripts.
A better starting point for future investigation might be a renewed exami
nation of plays already linked in some way to the early Shakespeare canon.
I am thinking particularly of two anonymous early plays, Edward III (printed
in 1596) and Edmund Ironside (extant in a manuscript dating from the 1590s).
Both plays are, like 1 Henry VI, based upon the English chronicles; more
over, Eliot Slater has demonstrated that, in terms of rare vocabulary, both
Edward III and Ironside are more strongly linked to I Henry VI than to any
other play in the Shakespeare canon.62 Likewise, Eric Sams has demon
strated that Ironside has exceptionally strong stylistic links with act 1 of
Titus Andronicus and 1 Henry VI.63 In short, existing scholar

gives us some reason to suspect common authorship of 1 Henry
III, and/or Ironside. If the foregoing argument is accepted, the
cant correspondences between these apocryphal plays and 1 H
be explained, without assuming Shakespeare's sole authorsh
III and Ironside.
I do not mean that scholars can simply dismiss the possibility of Shake
speare's presence in either apocryphal play. Recent scholarship on both
plays has been bedeviled by the same absolutism about authorship that has
stalled discussion of 1 Henry VI for more than half a century, an absolutism
which has its roots in the ideology of literary modernism.64 Hence, those
who have defended Shakespeare's presence in either play have insisted that
he wrote all of the text, while those who have denied Shakespeare's pres
ence have insisted that he wrote none of the text. Given the modernist
consensus that none of Shakespeare's early plays was collaborative, such
attitudes are historically understandable; but they are illogical and should
be abandoned at once. If in the early 1590s Shakespeare collaborated on
one play based on the English chronicles, then he might have collaborated
on others. Moreover, it would not be unusual, given the evidence of collabo
rations documented elsewhere, for a loose group of playwrights to col
laborate on more than one play. The exact membership of the group might
fluctuate—A, B, C collaborating on play X; A and C collaborating on play
Y; B and D collaborating on play Z, etc.—but some overlap would be more
likely than not.
Of the four apparent authors of 1 Henry VI, two can be quickly ruled out
of participation in Ironside. First, Ironside does not contain a single example
of Nashe's distinctive "here" in stage directions. Likewise, Ironside cannot
be Shakespeare's unassisted work. It contains forty-five examples of "ye,"
far more than in any Shakespeare play except the late collaborative All is
True and Two Noble Kinsmen.65 (This evidence also contradicts ascription
to Nashe.) The function-word test clearly eliminates Ironside from the
Shakespeare canon;66 it contains more examples of the obsolete form
"whenas" than the entire canon put together;67 the -eth inflection of verbs
in stage directions (which Shakespeare hardly ever uses) occurs twenty-one
times;68 for the play as a whole, only 3.6 percent of verse lines have feminine
endings, no single scene having a proportion higher than 9.1 percent, and
no scene longer than fifty lines having over 7.1 percent. The negative evi
dence here is overwhelming, and its distribution makes it difficult to discern
Shakespeare's presence in any significant stretch of text. Moreover, Sams's
arguments for Shakespeare's authorship are deeply flawed, both logically
and materially.69
Nevertheless, even the most damning critics of Sams have conceded that
180 GARY TAYLOR
the parallels he has observed between Ironside, 1 Henry VI, and Ti

dronicus are remarkable. But if Shakespeare did not write Ironside
discernible part of it, how do we account for its similarities with tw
cal plays? It seems likely enough that Sams is right to posit commo
ship as the simplest explanation for the observed facts; he is only w
assuming that the common author was Shakespeare. The relatio
tween Ironside and Titus falls outside the scope of this article; I w
remark that the parallels strongly reinforce existing doubts about
speare's authorship of three scenes of Titus (I.i, ILi, and IV.i).70 M
as R. F. Hill noted long ago, the stylistic anomalies of the suspect
of Titus are most closely matched by certain scenes in 1 Henry V/.7
seems entirely possible that an author or authors other than Shak
wrote Ironside, specific portions of Titus, and specific portions of
VI.
Certainly, anyone turning to Ironside after the preceding examin
1 Henry VI will be struck by the fact that the manuscript play ove
ingly prefers "Oh" (35 to 1) and uses "ye" 45 times (and "you" only
times). Both these preferences contrast strongly with Shakespe
Nashe's practice, but match the linguistic behavior of my putative
Y of 1 Henry VI: in fact, Ironside's ratio of "ye" to "you" (20
exactly matches that of Y. Since Author W used "Oh" and "O" indif
and made some use of "ye" (8 percent), he might also be present,
so his role must have been subordinate to Y's. The infrequency of
brackets—only three in the whole play—also accords with Y, and
with W. The proportion of feminine endings in Ironside is also co
with Y (and W, and the suspect scenes in Titus), but incompatible with
Shakespeare or Nashe.72
An examination of the verbal parallels collected by Sams tends to confirm
this association. The interesting verbatim and verbal parallels with portions
of 1 Henry VI attributed here to Shakespeare and Nashe are few and scat
tered; parallels to scenes here attributed to Author W cluster in certain
scenes; parallels to scenes here attributed to Author Y are much more
extensive. In the following list, culled from Sams, I give first the reference
to Ironside.
12 "my father's conquest"/IV.i.l48 "the conquest of my father" (W)

369/IV.i.l66 "true subjects]" (W)
493-4 "base . . . peasant"/V.vi.7-9, 21-22 "base . . . peasant" (Y)

596 "loss of life"/V.vi.78 "loss of . . . life" (Y)
726/III.vii.43 "to thy cost" (Y)
730 "Ha ha ha. Why laughest thou?'7II.ii.42-43 "Ha ha ha. Laughest

thou?" (W)
757/III.i. 157 "of force" (Y)

806/V.ii.l62 "plighted faith" (Y)
826/V.vi. 140 "lawful king" (Y)
835/III.i. 18 "enemy to peace" (Y)
846/V.vi.l30 "submit thyself" (Y)
868 "consumed to ashes"/V.vi.92 "consume to ashes" (Y)
905/IV.i.35 "full of haughty courage" (W)

1016/II.iii. 178 "with your patience" (W)
1019-22 "Praised be the eternal bulwark of this land, The fortress of my
crown, in whom I trust, That hath thus discomfited my foes By his
omnipotent all-conquering arm'7II.i.25-26 "God is our fortress, in
whose conquering name Let us resolve to scale their flinty bulwarks"
(W)
1098 "partners of your woes"/III.v.51 "partner of your . . . woe" (Y)

1303 "so like a woman to be won"/V.v.35 "a woman, therefore to be won"
(Y) [Titus II.i.82 "a woman, therefore may be won"]
1527/III. viii. 16 "brave captainsfs]" (Y)
1619/III.i. 138 "loving countrymen" (Y)
1640/III.i.82 "all [hail/health] unto my gracious sovereign" (Y)
1685, 1899 "the blood of innocents"/V.vi.44 "the . . . blood of inno
cents" (Y)
1692/III.i. 130 "the same" (Y)
1821/III.i. 161 "of force" (Y)
1873 "our slaughtered bodies'VIII.i.101 "our bodies slaughtered" (Y)
2027/III.i.68 "love and amity" (Y)
2053 "conclude an everlasting peace'VV.vi.113 "conclude a peace" (Y)
Clearly, this list is dominated by parallels with the Author Y scenes of 1

Henry VI; for the last half of Ironside—from the beginning of III.v to the
end of V.ii—there is, here, no sign at all of the presence of Author W. It is
possible that all the W parallels are fortuitous; certainly, the lone parallel at
Ironside 730 occurs in the middle of a scene which is otherwise associated
with Y. But the first two parallels are the only ones of note in Ironside's
first three scenes (act 1); they both come from W sections of 1 Henry VI.
Likewise, the three successive W parallels in the middle of act 3 (lines
905-1022) are suggestive.
On the basis of the evidence here surveyed, it is certainly possible that
182 GARY TAYLOR
the unidentified Author Y of parts of 1 Henry VI was also the main

of Ironside, and it is conceivable that a subordinate share of Ironsi
written by the unidentified Author W. Either of these authors migh
responsible for the suspect scenes of Titus (with nine examples of
Sams's most convincing scenic parallel links Ironside Il.i, Titus I
Henry VI V.v.
Edward III has a much better claim to inclusion in the Shakespear
than Ironside.™ Here it will suffice to observe that the evidence which d
guishes the four authors of 1 Henry VI discourages ascription of a
of Edward III to Nashe or to W. The word here never appears in stage
directions, and the 1596 quarto does not contain a single pair of round
brackets. But the evidence is compatible with authorship by Shakespeare
and Y. Like Shakespeare, Edward III prefers "O" (twenty-one times); three
of the four examples of "Oh" occur in acts 3 and 5, which most early investi
gators attributed to a collaborator; ten of the fourteen examples of "ye"
also fall in acts 3 and 5, with another in another scene usually denied to
Shakespeare (IV. ii). The pattern of feminine endings also lends itself to this
hypothesis.74 Certainly, the possibility that Shakespeare and Y collaborated
on Edward III warrants further investigation.75
Instead of attempting such an investigation—which would, in any case,

probably require a book—I wish to return, in conclusion, to Shakespeare's
share of Part One. Shakespeare can be confidently identified as the author
of ILiv and IV.ii-IV.vii.32; just as clearly, if the play represents a collabora
tion, its unevenness need not be attributed to Shakespeare's immaturity, and
there remains no obstacle to accepting the internal and external evidence
for composition in the first half of 1592; consequently, it becomes almost
impossible not to identify Henry the Sixth, Part One as the "Harey the vj"
so successfully performed by Lord Strange's Men at Henslowe's playhouse,
beginning on 3 March 1592. Part One thereby attains the distinction of being
the only play in the Shakespeare canon whose first performance can be
dated to the day. The play also confirms Shakespeare's connection with
Strange's Men. As is well known, the title page of Titus Andronicus claims
that the play had by 1592 been performed by both Strange's and Pembroke's
Men; E. A. J. Honigmann has recently reiterated and strengthened argu
ments that Shakespeare's manipulation of his sources in Richard III was
designed to flatter Lord Strange (a descendant of Stanley, earl of Derby, in
that play);76 eight of the eleven names associated with the early Chamber
Iain's Men can be traced back to Strange's Men in unambiguous documents

of 1590-93.
In the history of Shakespeare scholarship, these conclusions are neither
new nor startling: identification of Part One with Henslowe's play was com
mon until 1929, when Alexander, in his effort to claim the entire play for
Shakespeare, insisted that Shakespeare's play could not be Henslowe's.
Shakespeare unmistakably had some connection at some time in the early
1590s with Strange's Men; equally clearly, Part One dates from 1592 and
can be credibly linked by documentary evidence with both Shakespeare and
that company. Only one problem remains: why did the company not perform
any other Shakespeare plays that spring, or after? More specifically, why
did they not use the success of Part One as an occasion to revive Contention
and Duke of York?
The only plausible answer is that the company at that time did not possess
those plays. Honigmann wants to push Shakespeare's association with that
company back to the mid-1580s; by his "early chronology," Shakespeare
had by 1592 written ten extant plays for that company; yet in the records
of that company's performances for Henslowe in 1592-94, only one such
play (1 Henry VI) is named, and then it is misleadingly (according to Honig
mann) called "ne." None of this is very likely. Shakespeare might have been
writing plays since 1585, but he can hardly have been writing them all for
Strange's Men.
Either Strange's Men did not possess those other early Shakespeare plays
because, in spring 1592, they had not yet been written, or because, before
spring 1592, Shakespeare had been working for another company. Some
movement between companies would hardly be surprising. Shakespeare's
later association with the Chamberlain's Men is the first known example of
a single company monopolizing the services of a playwright; moreover,
Shakespeare is not named in any theatrical document before March 1595,
and hence was probably only a hired man (assuming that he began his career
as an actor). Hired men, like hired playwrights, had no fixed company alle
giances. In either event, the beginning of Shakespeare's association with
Strange's Men is most plausibly dated in the spring of 1592; either his contri
bution to Part One was one of his first compositions, or one of his first
compositions for that company.
All of this may be deduced without in any way committing ourselves to
a chronology for the rest of the early Shakespeare canon. But I have already
indicated that Part One was probably written after Contention and Duke of
York. If so, then those plays must, in early 1592, have belonged to another
company. Eventually, Duke of York (and by plausible inference Contention)
turned up in the possession of Pembroke's Men, an obscure company also
associated with Titus and Shrew. We do not know how or when they acquired
184 GARY TAYLOR
them, or even much about the company itself, and it would be fru
speculate more, or to hope that such speculation would help us
understand the composition of Part One itself.
What does matter is that Part One is the only securely dated pla
early Shakespeare canon—or rather, that Il.iv and IV.ii-IV.vii.32 of
One are the most securely dated passages of early Shakespearean d
verse. One of the problems which has hampered previous efforts t
the chronology of Shakespeare's early work has been the absence o
reliable point of reference that might be used in order to evaluate the v
of internal evidence of Shakespeare's stylistic development. One su
extensively documented in recent years, is Shakespeare's use o
words, which shows a statistically significant correlation with chr
ogy. We should therefore expect that plays written before and af
One would have the most links with the "rare" vocabulary of Il.iv and
IV.ii-IV.vii.32. (See Table 3.)77
These figures are useful in a variety of ways. They confirm that Shake
speare's share of Part One is closer in time to Duke of York (the play with
the highest proportion of shared rare vocabulary) than to Contention (tenth).
Of course, it is possible that these figure are being distorted by the presence
of non-Shakespearean material in Contention and Duke of York, but anyone
who assumes Shakespeare's sole authorship of those plays must be struck
by the disparity in their correspondences with Shakespeare's share of Part
One. Of the plays whose authorship is not contested, Richard III comes
closest, followed by Richard II, with Titus and Two Gentlemen sharing the
fourth position. This is useful, in that it suggests that Richard III (which
flatters Lord Strange's ancestor) belongs to the same period of composition
as Part One (apparently performed by Strange's Men). Beyond that, the
figures are of little value, for the vocabulary may have been affected by
genre: the first three plays, in order of closeness, are all early histories:
Duke of York, Richard III, and Richard II, in that order (which is also their
accepted order of composition). On such evidence, one would be inclined
to place Part One between Duke of York and Richard III; but the chronology
of the early comedies and tragedies in relation to the histories remains as
obscure as ever. The absence of full figures for the rare vocabulary of the
poems is also disappointing. It is impossible to put any faith in the chrono
logical significance of any but the most striking links, which are with Duke
of York, Richard III, Richard II, Titus, and Two Gentlemen.
But such evidence can be supplemented by a second set of links, based
not upon single rare words, but upon "rare" verbal collocations of two or
more words, collocations which occur less than eleven times in the canon
as a whole. For instance, the question "What means this silence?" in the
very first line of Shakespeare's contribution to Part One (Il.iv. 1) is matched
by "what meant this wilful silence?" at Richard III III.vii.28. The two
phrases are identical, except for the change of tense in the verb and the
addition of the adjective in Richard III. This phrasal parallel thus constitutes
one "link" between Shakespeare's share of Part One and Richard III. The
next line of the same scene collocates "dare" and "answer" ("Dare no man
answer"); the same collocation occurs at Much Ado IV.i. 18 and V.i.89. This
phrasal parallel thus constitutes two "links" between Shakespeare's share
of Part One and Much Ado. Shakespeare's share of Part One has 352 such
phrasal links with the rest of the canon.
These are the sorts of verbal parallels which have sometimes been used
as evidence of authorship (as in the links between Ironside and 1 Henry VI);
but that is not how I am using them. In the first place, I am not by this test
trying to prove that Shakespeare wrote the relevant passages of Part One;
I already have good reason to believe that he did. If I were trying to use
these parallels to strengthen the case for Shakespeare's authorship, I would
have to compile similar lists of parallels with all the other playwrights work
ing in the early 1590s—an exhaustive job, which I have not attempted.
This evidence therefore, in its current form, cannot be cited as evidence of
Shakespeare's authorship. Rather, if we assume Shakespeare's authorship
of these scenes, then the parallels between these scenes and the rest of the
canon may tell us when Shakespeare composed them. At least, it is worth
investigating whether the number of such parallels between works by the
same author is a function of proximity of date. The parallels are here being
used for dating, not attributing. Moreover, in the past such parallels have
been cited selectively and randomly; such citations are always dubious,
because the selection may be consciously prejudiced or innocently unrepre
sentative. By contrast, in my own examination of such parallels I have
checked in the Shakespeare concordance every word, and every possible
phrasal combination or collocation, throughout the whole of the passages in
Part One assigned to Shakespeare. A complete list of the phrasal links found
by this process is contained in Appendix II. The resulting profile of phrasal
parallels in Shakespeare's share of this play is therefore both verifiable and
comprehensive. Moreover, because it is comprehensive, it can be evalu
ated statistically.
The distribution of these phrasal links is summarized in Table 4, and it
strongly reinforces the rare vocabulary evidence. The test reveals a clear
chronological bias: no work after King John has a significant excess of links,
no work before Merchant has a significant deficiency of links, a solid cluster
of early works from Contention to Lucrece all have significant excesses,
while the tightest clustering of works with significant deficiencies comes at
the other end of the canon. Of the plays, Richard III is in first place, followed
closely by Duke of York; again, Contention, by contrast, is relatively insig
nificant (sixth in this list; tenth in the other). The two tests in conjunction
thus create a very strong presumption that Shakespeare's share of Part One
186 GARY TAYLOR
belongs to the same period as, and most probably between, Duke o
and Richard III.
This test in two respects is more helpful than that of rare vocabulary.
First, it shows a strong correspondence with Titus Andronicus—another
play demonstratably associated with Strange's Men. Secondly, this test en
ables us to evaluate statistically links with the poems (as we cannot do with
Slater's rare vocabulary test). The strong association between the narrative
poems (1593-4) and Part One thus reinforces the assumption that Shake
speare's contribution to Part One (Strange's?) does not date from the 1580s,
but instead belongs to the same period of his development as Duke of York,
Richard III (Strange's?) and Titus (Strange's).
Many other tests of chronologically-variable stylistic evidence should be
conducted, if we are to make the best use of what we have learned about
Part One in relation to Shakespeare's other early work;78 more extensive
tests of authorial variables need to be attempted, if we are to understand the
nature of Shakespeare's relationships with other playwrights in the period of
his apprenticeship. Both kinds of investigation would be helped by, and
would contribute to, a reconsideration of the possibility that Contention and
Duke of York were, like Part One, collaborative works. But for the moment
it seems safe to conclude, barring the discovery of very strong evidence to
the contrary, that Part One was written by Shakespeare, Nashe, and two
other as-yet-unidentified playwrights, that it was first performed by
Strange's Men at the Rose Theater on 3 March 1592, that at the time of its
composition Contention and Duke of York had already been written and
performed by some other company, and that Titus and Richard III were
written at about the same time.
In September of the year in which Shakespeare collaborated with three
other playwrights in writing Henry the Sixth, Part One, Robert Greene
attacked Shakespeare and warned other playwrights to avoid him; Shake
speare, atypically for a professional playwright in this period, apparently
did not write another collaborative play for more than a decade. Greene's
attack, fortuitously but fortunately, probably had the effect of making col
laboration an exception in the Shakespeare canon, rather than the rule: the
upstart crow set out to demonstrate to the world that he did not need anyone
else's feathers.
Appendix 1
Round Brackets
Compositor B's fondness for brackets is suggested by his practice in the following
plays, where, in each case, he sets proportionally more brackets than Compositor
A, working from the same kind of copy.
Compositor Brackets Words in Stint Words per bracket

R2 B 50 12543 251
A 21 8939 426
H5 B 20 5298 265
A 19 21715 *1143
2H6 B 13 14580 1122
A 2 11714 *5857
3H6 B 33 9806 297
A 15 15356 *1024
R3 B 66 19709 299
A 10 10541 *1054
COR B 47 22043 469
A 12 6762 564
MAC B 18 9967 554
A 9 7865 875
JC B 28 16460 588
A 3 3138 *1046
The only apparent exception to this rule is Winter's Tale:
B 126 10214 81
A 242 15624 65
But for this play it is

nary number of brack
torial practice.
From this data we mu
brackets, or that Comp
second explanation is su
SHR B 19 13795 726

C 0 4246 *(4246)
D 0 3877 *(3877)
ANT B 40 19346 484
E 6 6483 *1080
We should hardly exp

only B preserved them
retaining copy punctu
is known, he added m
is therefore evident t
B is greater than the
respect at least) more
Of the eleven Folio t
material not set by C
sand words. The exc
Winter's Tale), anothe
188 GARY TAYLOR
set from a late reprint of a quarto (Richard II, discussed below). Therefo
ignore Compositor B's stints, the evidence of these Folio plays would sug
Shakespeare's manuscripts contained relatively few round brackets.
Shakespeare's practice may be further studied by an examination of th
quartos of his poems.
Brackets Words Printer Words per bracket

VENUS (1594) 2 9738 Field *4869
LUCRECE (1595) 13 14548 Field *1119
SONNETS (1609) 23 20091 Eld 873
The figures for the Sonnets in

The proportion of brackets in
poems; it is also noticeably sim
same year, probably by the s
probably set from scribal copy
are generally agreed that, by c
autograph fair copies, proofre
can compare other work by th
as printer's copy for Sir John
survived; the overwhelming m
the print, thus confirming tha
probably have been respected
Orlando also adds many bracke
then, the figures for the narr
round brackets.81
This evidence of the early qu
used few brackets. A similar
quartos.
Brackets Words Printer Words per bracket
TIT (1594) 8 19790 Danter *2474
R2 (1598) 49 21809 Simmes 445
LLL (1598) 47 21033 White 448
1H4 (1598) 23 23955 Short *1042
ROM (1599) 10 23913 Creede *2391
MND (1600) 45 16087 Bradock 357
MV (1600) 13 20921 Roberts *1609
2H4 (1600) 54 25706 Simmes 476
ADO (1600) 21 20768 Simmes 989
HAM (1604) 13 29551 Roberts *2273
LEAR (1608) 4 25221 Okes *6305
TRO (1609) 34 25516 Eld 750
OTH (1622) 9 25887 Okes *2875
Some of these quartos—Titus, Romeo, I Henry IV, Merchant, Hamlet, Lear, and
Othello—share very low frequencies of brackets; they were set by Danter, Creede,
Short, Roberts, and Okes. Others—particularly Dream (the only play set by Bra
dock), Richard II, 2 Henry IV, and Much Ado (all set by Simmes)—share relatively
high frequencies. As I have already observed, the figures for Troilus are most plausi
bly attributed to Eld's compositors; Love's Labour's Lost claims to be, and probably
is, a reprint, and many of its brackets might derive from compositor(s) of a lost first
edition. Until we know more about the work of all these printers, it will be impossible
to be sure that the "low" frequency group more accurately reflects copy. But in
general printers of this period tend to add punctuation, rather than taking it away.
Finally, the evidence of three Folio texts—the three Folio texts most widely be
lieved to have been set from autograph copy—further supports the conclusion that
Shakespeare himself used few brackets.
ERRORS B 6 7507 *1251

C, D 9 8060 896
HENRY V A 19 21715 *1143
ALL'S WELL B 12 20025 *1669
C, D 2 4111 *2055
All these figures—even those for Compositor B, which are almost certainly inflated—
fall within the range suggested by the good quartos of Venus, Lucrece, Titus, Romeo,
1 Henry IV, Merchant, Hamlet, Lear, and Othello, and also suggested by the seven
asterisked Folio texts discussed at the beginning of this appendix. It therefore seems
reasonable to postulate that Shakespeare's autograph manuscripts contained rela
tively few round brackets.
Appendix 2
Phrasal Collocations between the Shakespeare Canon and Henry the Sixth, Part
One, II.iv and IV.ii-IV.vii.32
n •iv.l what means this silence (Richard III III.vii.28)

2 dare no man answer (Ado IV.i.18, V.i.89)
3 too loud (Twelfth Night I.v.271, Othello II.i.268, Cymbeline IV.ii.215)
5 say at once (Romeo V.iii.229)
6 in the error (Errors III.ii.35, Othello I.iii.10)
8 frame the law unto my will (Pericles II.v.81: Wilkins)
8 law unto my will (Two Gentlemen V.iv.14, Measure Il.iv. 175)
11 flies the higher pitch (Contention II.i.6, Caesar I.i.73)
11 higher pitch (Richard II I.i. 109)
12 deeper mouth (Shrew Ind.i. 18, John V.ii. 173, Henry V V.pro. 11)
19 tut, tut (.Richard III I.iii.349, IV.ii.22, Richard II II.iii.86, I Henry IV IV.ii.65)
20 truth appears (Dream Ill.ii. 125, Merchant IV.i.214, Ado II.ii.48, Measure
III.i.206, V.i.66)
20 truth appears so naked (LLL V.ii.710)
20 appears so naked (Ado IV.i.175, Henry V IV.i. 105, V.ii.294, 297)
22 so well apparelled (Shrew III.ii.89)
23 so clear (Macbeth I.vii.18)
190 GARY TAYLOR
23 so evident (Coriolanus IV.vii.52, Winter's Tale II.ii.41)

28 honor of his birth (Pericles I.ii.114: Wilkins)
31 no coward nor no flatterer (Caesar Ill.i. 193 "either a coward or a flatte
32 dare maintain (1 Henry IV IV.iii.9, Troilus II.i. 126)
32 maintain the party of the truth (Lear V.iii. 100)
33 rose from off his thorn (Lucrece 492, Dream I.i.76-77, Sonnets 30,
Henry IV I.iii. 176, All's Well I.iii. 129, IV.ii. 18-19)
35 base insinuating (Titus IV.ii.38)
38 held the right (John II.i.282)
46 truth and plainness (Troilus IV.iv.106)
48 giving my verdict (Richard III I.iv.184)
49 prick not their finger (Duke of York I.iv.55, Lucrece 319, Romeo I.iv.69
IV Il.ii. 112)
50 bleeding you do paint (Duke of York I.iv.12, LLL IV.iii.259, John IV.ii.25
V III.v.49, Troilus I.i.91, Timon IV.iii.60)
53 surgeon to my hurt (Othello II.iii.254)
56 study and my books (Part One V.i.22)
57 argument you held (LLL IV.iii.59, Ado II.iii.53)
58 in sign whereof (Shrew I.ii.273, Part One III.iv.5, Richard III III.v.79)
59-60 where is your argument?—Here in my scabbard {Ado V.i.125: "Wil
thy wit?—It is in my scabbard")
61 dye your white rose in a bloody red (Duke of York I.ii.33—34: "Until
rose that I wear be dy'd Even in the lukewarm blood of Henry's heart"
62 cheeks do counterfeit our roses (Two Gentlemen IV.iv. 154, Romeo IV
63 pale they look with fear (Lucrece 183)
63-64 witnessing the truth (Two Gentlemen IV.iv.69, Errors V.i.255, Ado I
65 fear, but anger (Kinsmen Il.ii. 188: Fletcher)
66 blush for pure shame to counterfeit our roses (Venus 590, Lucrece 47
66 blush for pure shame (Venus 69, 558)
66 blush for pure shame (John V.ii.153)
69 rose a thorn (see II.iv.33)
70 sharp and piercing (Richard III IV.iv. 125, Pericles IV.i.28)
70 maintain his truth (Lear V.iii. 100)
71 canker eats (Two Gentlemen I.i.43, 46, Venus 656, Romeo II.iii.30, Sonn
76 peevish boy CRichard III IV.ii.97, Caesar V.i.61, As You III.v.110)
79 my part thereof (Richard III I.iii.307)
85 spring crestless yeomen from so deep a root (Richard II I.ii. 13)
85 deep a root (Cymbeline I.vi.164)
86 bears him on the place's privilege (Titus IV.ii. 116, John I.i. 161)
88 maintain my words (2 Henry IV III.ii.75, IV.ii.67, Twelfth Night IV.ii.
94 guilty in thy blood (Titus V.ii.183)
96-97 My father was ... no traitor (As You I.iii.63: "My father was no tr
97 condemn'd to die for treason (Venus 729)
97 condemn'd to die (Errors I.i.25, Measure II.ii.34)
99 growing time (Measure I.iv.41)
99 growing time once ripened (Dream Il.ii. 117, 2 Henry IV IV.i. 13)
101 book of memory (Contention I.i. 100)
104 thou shall find us ready (Shrew IV.iv.34: "me you shall find ready")
107 pale and angry rose (Cymbeline IV.ii.221)
107-8 rose . . . blood-drinking (Contention III.ii.63)
110 it [-rose] wither (Duke of York II.v. 101, Richard II V.i.8, Dream I.i.77,
Othello V.ii. 15)
111 height of my degree (Richard III III.vii.88)
112 go forward (Shrew I.i. 163, All is True I.ii. 177, Kinsmen III.v.98: Fletcher)
112 chok'd with thy ambition (Contention Ill.i. 143, Part One II.v. 123)
113 / meet thee next (Part One IV.i.14)
116 blot. . . wip'd out (Contention IV.i.40)
123 upon [possessive pronoun] party (Richard III III.ii.47, IV.iv.526, Richard II
III.ii.203, Jo/w I.i.34, Ill.i. 123,1 Henry IV V.v.6, Lear II.i.26, Coriolanus I.i.234)
124 and here I prophesy (Duke of York V.vi.37)
125 grown to this faction in this Temple garden (Contention III.i.32, Henry V
IV.vii.99, Hamlet I.ii. 135)
127 death and deadly (Two Gentlemen Ill.i. 185, Shrew IViii. 14, Duke of York
II.vi.43, Titus V.iii.66)
133 drink blood (Duke of York Il.iii. 15, Titus III.i.22, Richard III I.ii.63, Ill.iii. 14,
IV.iv.30, Romeo III.v.59, Hamlet III.ii.390)
IV.il. 1—2 trumpeter. Summon their general un/o the wall (John Il.i. 198)
6 be humble (Shrew III.i.89)
7 do him homage (Two Gentlemen IV.i.64, Shrew Ind.i.135, Errors Il.i. 104, Sonnet
7, Othello I.i.54, Macbeth III.vi.36, Antony I.ii.54, Tempest I.ii. 113)
7 obedient subjects (Richard III II.ii.45, IV.ii.67, All is True Ill.ii. 180)
8 bloody power (John II.i.221)
9 but if you frown upon this proferr'd peace (John II.i.258: "but if you fondly pass
our preferred offer")
16 bloody scourge (Contention V.i. 118)
17 the period of thy tyranny (Contention Ill.i. 149)
20 issue out and fight (Duke of York V.i.63: Issue out again and bid us battle")
21 well appointed (Duke of York Il.i. 113)
22 tangle thee (Contention II.iv.55)
24 the liberty to (Errors Vi-53)
28-29 have ta'en the sacrament to (Richard II V.ii.97)
30 Christian soul (Richard III IV. iv.408)
32 invincible unconquer'd spirit (Contention I.iv.7, Ado Il.iii. 114)
33 glory of [possessive pronoun] praise (Pericles I.i. 14: Wilkins)
35 the glass that now begins to run (Winter's Tale I.ii.306, Kinsmen V.i. 18)
35-6 glass . . . sandy hour (Merchant I.i.25)
38 bloody, pale (Venus 1169, Richard II II.iv.10, Romeo III.ii.55)
38 pale and dead (Richard III III.vii.26, Errors IV.iv.93, Richard II III.ii.79, Henry
' V IV.ii.48)
44 O negligent and heedless discipline (John II.i.413)
45-46 park'd and bounded in a pale . . . deer (Venus 231, Errors Il.i. 100)
46 a little herd of England's timorous deer (Venus 689)
192 GARY TAYLOR
FV.iii.5 march'd along (Duke of York II.ii.70, Henry V III.v. 11, Caesar IV.i
Troilus V.ix.7)
8 made [possessive pronoun] march (Macbeth V.ii.31)
10 my promised supply (2 Henry IV 1.3.28: "promise of supply"—in both c
promise is not kept, with fatal results)
15 God comfort [pronoun] (Twelfth Night III.iv.32)
16 (/[pronoun] miscarry (John V.iv.3, 2 Henry IV IV.ii.46, Lear V.i.44)
17 leader of our English strength (Titus I.i. 194: "led my country's strengt
20 girdled with a waist (Lucrece 6, John II.i.217)
26 valiant gentleman (2 Henry IV IV.i.130, Henry V III.ii.67)
27 a traitor and a coward (Richard II I.i. 102)
28 wrathful fury (Titus V.iii. 184, Henry V IV.vii.35)
30 send some succor to the distress'd lord (Contention III.i.285)
30 distress'd lord (Pericles I.iv.7: Wilkins)
32 daily get (Duke of York II.v.91)
36 warlike father (Duke of York Il.i. 19, Richard III I.ii. 159)
42 sunder'd friends (Richard III V.iii. 100: same situation: long-sundered
should have time for leisurely reunion, but don't because they meet on
of battle)
42 friends greet in the hour of death (Titus I.i. 190, Twelfth Night II.iv.61)
44 curse the cause (Dream III.ii.46)
47-48 vulture . . . Feeds in the bosom (Richard III V.ii.7-10: "boar . . . makes his
trough In your embowell'd bosoms")
48 in the bosom of such great commanders (Lucrece 1387)
50 conquest of our scarce-cold conqueror (Richard III III. i. 87)
IV.iv.6 sully all his gloss (Kinsmen I.ii.5)

6 former honor (As You V.iv.186)
7 desperate wild adventure (Richard III V.iii.319)
23 lend [pronoun] aid (Richard III V.iii. 173)
24 renowned noble (Measure III. i. 219)
25 yield up his life (Duke of York II.v.59)
27 compass [pronoun] about (Tempest V.i.180)
34 owe him little duty (Shrew V.ii.131, 155, Duke of York V.vii.28, Titus I.i.414,
Richard II I.iii. 180, John II.i.247, All's Well Il.iii. 161)
35 foul scorn (Duke of York II.i.64)
36 fraud of England, not the force (Duke of York IV.iv.33, Lucrece 1243)
46 fame lives (Titus I.i. 158, 390, Richard III III.i.81, 88, LLL I.i. 1-2, Ado V.iii.8)
46 fame lives in the world, his shame (Lucrece 1188, 1202)
IV.v.8 unavoided danger (Richard II II.i.268)

10 I'll direct [pronoun] how (All's Well III.vii.20, Coriolanus Il.iii.46)
10 how thou shalt escape (Duke of York I.i. 1, IV.vi.80, Tempest Il.ii. 127; Kinsmen
IV.i.20: Fletcher)
11 dally not, be gone (Shrew IV.iv.68, Errors I.ii.59)
14 dishonor not her honorable name (Contention Il.i. 195, IV.i.39, Lucrece 621)
14 honorable name (Titus I.i.239)
15 to make a bastard and a slave of me (Titus Il.iii. 148: "wouldst thou have me
prove myself a bastard?")
15 to make a bastard and a slave of me (Shrew II.i.2)
17 basely fled (Venus 894)
17 basely fled when noble Talbot stood (Lucrece 660)
18 revenge [possessive pronoun] death (Duke of York I.i. 100, Il.iii. 19, Richard III
I.ii.62, 63, Caesar III.ii.243)
19 ne'er return (Contention Ill.ii. 166, Richard III I.i. 117)
23 my worth unknown (Sonnet 116.8)
27 exploit have done (Contention I.i. 196, Errors IV.iii.28)
28 every one will swear (Merchant Il.ix. 12)
33 life preserv'd with infamy (Lucrece 1055)
35 shame my mother's womb (John I.i.64, V.ii. 152-53, Richard III II.ii.29)
36 upon my blessing I command (As You I.i.4: "charg'd my brother, on his blessing")
36 I command [pronoun] [verb] (Contention IV.viii.5)
42 [possessive pronoun] father's charge (All's Well Il.iii. 114)
49 in twain divide (Troilus II.iii.245)
IV.vi.1 Saint George and victory (Duke of York V.i.i 13)

4 pause and take thy breath (.Duke of York II.vi.31, Richard III IV.ii.24, Troilus
IV. v. 192)
10 from the Dauphin's crest thy sword struck fire (Titus I.i.364)
11 warmed thy father's heart (Richard II Ill.ii. 131, Sonnet 154, Hamlet IV.vii.56,
Complaint 191, Cymbeline I.vi.28)
13 warlike rage (Richard IIII.i. 173, Il.iv. 14)
14 blood my boy did drench (Venus 1054, Henry V IV.vii.77, Antony II.vi. 18)
19 interchanging blows (Romeo I.i. 113)
21 bespoke him thus (Hamlet Il.ii. 140)
23 right poor (Titus III.ii.7)
25 purposing the bastard to destroy (Lucrece 514)
29 the son of chivalry (Troilus I.ii.229)
30 revenge [possessive pronoun] death (see IV. v. 18)
32 well I wot (Duke of York Il.ii. 134, IV.vii.83, V.iv.71, Titus II.i.48, Ill.i. 139, V.ii.87,
Richard II V.vi. 18, Dream III.ii.422)
33 to hazard all our lives (Two Gentlemen V.iv.21; Timon III.v.37: Middleton)
35 mickle age (Contention V.i.174)
37 shortening of my life one day (2 Henry IV V.ii. 145, Winter's Tale IV.iv.422)
39 my death's revenge (see IV.v. 18)
59 shame's scorn (Lucrece 1189)
49 subject of mischance (Venus 737-38)
52 it is no boot (Shrew V.ii. 176)
IV.vii.7 a hungry lion (Two Gentlemen V.iv.33, Dream V.i.371)

7-8 commence rough deeds (Pericles II.v.53: Wilkins)
8 rough deeds of rage and stern impatience (Contention IV.L121, Duke of York
I.iv.142)
8 rage and stern impatience (Two Gentlemen II.vii.26)
11 dizzy-ey'd fury (Romeo III.i. 124)
194 GARY TAYLOR
11 fury and great rage (Duke of York I.iv.28, Henry V IV.vii.35, Lear IlI.
11 great rage (Lear IV.vii.77, Kinsmen I.ii.85)
18 antic death (Richard II Ill.ii. 162)
18 laugh'st us here to scorn (As You IV.ii.18, Macbeth IV.i.79, V.v.3, V.vii
21 1\vo Talbots winged (also used of a dead soul ascending to heaven at C
lll.iii. 16 and Lucrece 1728)
22 scape mortality (Duke of York Il.ii. 15)
19 insulting tyranny (Richard III II.iv.51)
24 yield thy breath (Richard III V.iii. 172)
TABLES
TABLE 1
A 108 0
A 120 (j) O
A 157 0
A 501 0 Act One
A 541 o
A 542 0
A 635 o 1
A 1110 Oh »
A 1178 0 I | Act Two, scene five
A 1276 Oh
A 1288 Oh
A 1322 Oh Act Three
A 1358 Oh
A 1482 0) Oh
A 1644 Oh
B
B
1808
1899
0
Oh
\| Act Four, scene one
B 1995 0
B 2034 0
B 2040 0
B 2114 o
B 2119 0
A 2126 o ► IV.ii-IV.vii.32
A 2177 o
A 2203 Oh 1
A 2232 o 1
A 2248 (j) o
B 2254 o /
B 2282
Oh \
B 2313 Oh I
B 2315 Oh J
Oh 1
B 2440
B 2469 Oh 1
B 2483 Oh \ IV.vii.33-end
B 2497 Oh 1
B 2631 Oh 1
B 2673 0 1
B 2716 Oh 1
B 2752 Oh /
W 2.1-2.3, 2.; O/Oh Puzell Burgundie 8 3 Ioane. none 3 0 3 Bishop 0 13 4 4% fifth — three — — 4 1
X (Shakespeare) 2.4, 4.2-4.7.32 O — Burgundie 0 1

— none 0 7 0 — 0 12 2 23% sixth — two (two) present 14 6
TABLE 2
Y (Acts Thre & Five) Oh Pucelle Burgonie 4 2 Puc. present 20 2 3 Bishop 1 32 11 4% fifth two three thre syl ables — 3 2
Act One
Z (Thomas Nashe) O Puzel — 0 11 Puzel. none 0 0 1 Cardinal 9 31 14 8% fifth one syl able thre syl ables — — 8 4
(unusual)
Betwixt fi th or sixth syl able
1. O/Oh 2. Pucel e 3. Burgundy (Compositor A) 4. round brackets (Comp. A) 5. ne'er 6. spe ch prefixes 7. scene divis ons 8. ye 9. Betwe n
10. Winchester 1 . Her in stage directions 12. Obsolet syl abic -ed 13. Obsolete -eth 14. feminine ndings 15. Pause more frequent after 16. Rouen 17. Orleans 18. Hecate 19.SirWil amLucy(Stratford) 20. compound adjectives
TABLE 3
I II III IV
TGV 372 12 7.9
SHR 602 14 12.7
CONT 814 18 17.2
YORK 614 40 13.0 56.1
TIT 642 18 13.6
R3 782 37 11.6 25.5
ERR 416 11 8.8
LLL 709 4 8.6
R2 626 27 13.2 14.4
ROM 657 12 14.4
MND 568 8 12.4
JOHN 642 15 13.6
MV 535 9 11.7
1H4 730 13 16.0
MWW 532 4 11.6 -5.0
2H4 743 13 16.2
ADO 434 13 9.2
H5 836 13 18.3
JC 385 11 8.4
AYLI 571 12 12.5
HAM 1075 11 23.5 -6.6
TN 555 6 12.1 -3.1
TRO 901 22 19.0
MM 486 6 10.6
OTH 654 12 14.3
AWW 594 11 13.0
TIM 486 6 10.6
LEAR (Q) 713 13 15.6

MAC 567 9 12.4
ANT 638 17 13.9
PER 495 9 10.8
COR 697 18 14.8
WT 698 8 15.3 -3.5
CYM 732 16 16.0
TMP 554 9 12.1
AIT 553 6 12.1 -3.1
TOTAL 22603 494
TNK 19
SONN 11
VEN 22
LUC 24
I = total number of "rare" words in play (figures from Slater)

11=actual number of links with the rare vocabulary of 1H6 2.4, 4.2-4.7.32
III = expected number of such links, on null hypothesis (chance distribution)
IV = chi-square value of discrepancy between II and III (excluding all figures be
tween -2.9 and 2.9)
198 GARY TAYLOR
TABLE 4
I II III IV
TGV 16883 10 6.9
SHR 20411 13 8.4
CONT 24450 19 10.1 8.1
YORK 23295 32 9.6 52.3
TIT 19790 18 8.1 12.1
R3 28309 37 11.6 55.6
VEN 9730 11 4.0 12.3
LUC 14548 16 6.0 16.7
ERR 14369 9 5.9
LLL 21033 4 8.6
SON 17520 10 7.2
R2 21809 16 9.0 5.4
ROM 23913 8 9.8
MND 16087 8 6.6
JOHN 20386 16 8.6 6.9
MV 20921 3 8.6 -3.6
1H4 23955 5 9.8
MWW 21119 0 8.7 -8.7
2H4 25706 8 10.6
ADO 20768 9 8.5
H5 25577 12 10.5
JC 19110 7 7.9
AYLI 21305 5 8.8
HAM 29551 4 12.1 -5.4
TN 19401 4 8.0
TRO 25516 7 10.5
MM 21269 6 8.7
OTH 25887 5 10.6 -3.0
AWW 22550 7 9.3
TIM 17748 2 7.3 -3.8
LEAR 25221 6 10.4
MAC 16436 6 6.8
ANT 23742 2 9.8 -6.2
PER 17723 6 7.3
COR 26579 3 10.9 -5.7
WT 24543 3 10.1 -5.0
CYM 26778 4 11.0 -4.5
TMP 16036 3 6.6
AIT 23325 2 9.6 -6.0
TNK 23403 6 9.6
TOTAL 856702 352
I = total number of words in play (figures from Spevack)

II = number of phrasal links with 1H6 2.4, 4.2-4.7.32
III = expected number of such links, on null hypothesis (chance distribution)
IV = chi-square value of discrepancy between II and III (excluding all figures be
tween - 2.9 and 2.9)
Notes
1. British Academy Annual Shakespeare Lecture (London: The British Acad

emy, 1924); William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1930), 1: 289-93.
2. Shakespeare's Henry VI and Richard III (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1929).
3. Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1944), vii: "I have
thus been emboldened to pass over the large amount of writing based on" the hy
pothesis of collaboration. For Ulrici see Shakespeare's Dramatic Art, trans. A. J.
W. Morrison (London: Chapman, 1846), 350-51, 385-98, 408-10.
4. Construction in Shakespeare, Contributions in Modern Philology, no. 17 (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1951), 24-37.
5. "The Authorship of 1 Henry VI," PMLA 67 (1952): 809-22.
6. The First Part of King Henry VI (London: Methuen, 1962), xviii-xxvi.
7. The most explicit and detailed evaluation of Cairncross's edition is contained
in a review article by Robert K. Ttorner, Jr., in Shakespeare Studies 3 (1967): 167-72.
8. For a detailed reconsideration of Cairncross's textual hypothesis, see Stanley
Wells, Gary Taylor, et al., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1987), 217—18. I there concluded that the printer's copy for the
Folio text was annotated authorial papers. Act-scene-line references to Shake
speare's works are keyed to The Complete Works, gen. ed. Stanley Wells and Gary
Taylor (Oxfofd: Clarendon Press, 1986).
9. See Marion Trousdale, "Diachronic and Synchronic: Critical Bibliography and
the Acting Of Plays," in Shakespeare: Text, Language, Criticism, ed. Bernhard
Fabian and Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1987), 304-14;
Margreta de Grazia, "The essential Shakespeare and the material book," Textual
Practice 2 (1988): 69-86; Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History
from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989),
278-83; Paul Werstine, "Narratives About Printed Shakespearean Texts: 'Foul Pa
pers' and 'Bad' Quartos," Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 65-86.
10. For recent examples, see David Bevington, "Determining the Indeterminate:
The Oxford Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987), 501-19, and Brian Vick
ers's review in Review of English Studies n.s. 40 (1989): 403—11.
11. For conclusions about these collaborative plays, see Gary Taylor, "The Canon
and Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays," in Textual Companion, 69-144.
12. The Chamberlain's Men are first mentioned in June 1594; Shakespeare and
Burbage are identified as leading members in March 1595; Heminges in December
1596; Condell in 1598. See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1923), 2: 192-97. If we assume that Heminges and Condell were
members of the Chamberlain's Men from the company's inception, we can push their
association with Shakespeare back to 1594-95.
13. Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), 281v-82. The book (STC 17834) was
entered in the Stationers' Register on 7 September 1598.
14. See for instance Thomas Dekker's The First Introduction of the Civil Wars of
France (1599), written after Parts 1, 2, and 3 of The Civil Wars of France (1598,
Dekker and Drayton). Likewise, Chettle, after completing Cardinal Wolsey's Life,
immediately began work on The Rising,of Cardinal Wolsey. For both these examples,
see Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1961), 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103. Further evidence is provided by
Thomas Middleton's The Widow (c. 1616), IV.ii.65-68: "Now, by this light, the second
part o'th' justice / Newly revived, with never a hair on's face. / It should be the first
200 GARY TAYLOR
rather by his smoothness, / But I ha

Robert Turner's trenchant remark: by
be set before the first" (168).
15. "The T\vo-Part Play," Shakespear
16. The First Part of King Henry VI
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr
17. McKerrow's views on the play ca
proofs of his projected volume 1 (con
scripts of several stages of his introd
University Press, and now deposited i
concerning the Oxford Shakespeare p
18. This anomaly was pointed out to
19. In Shakespeare and the Homilies
1934), Alfred Hart published a statisti
early Shakespeare canon. Hart showed
plays is much larger than that in the
collaborators in this period. But th
authorship because the combined voc
each with a limited but different voca
vocabulary of a single writer. In respe
One has 1,603 words (55 percent of its
but only 1,480 words (51 percent of i
on this basis Part One would appear cl
Contention has a considerably larger v
2,740), so that even if the distributio
share more words with Contention tha
relationship of the three vocabularies,
size, would measure the proportion o
Part One (52 percent); 1480 of Duke o
percent). In other words, a slightly la
reappears (or originates) in Part One—
the other plays, by the same author.
20. "Shakespeare: Word Links Betw
220 (1975): 157-63; "Word Links with
Queries 220 (1975): 169-71; "Word Lin
and Queries 222 (1977): 109-12; "Word
Lear,'" Notes and Queries 223 (1978):
and Macbeth," The Bard 2 (1978): 4-22.
21. For these figures I have drawn upon Slater's posthumously published The
Problem of "The Reign of King Edward III": A Statistical Approach (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), based upon his 1981 doctoral thesis. The reliabil
ity of Slater's tests as an indication of date depends, of course, upon the presumption
of common authorship. The tests are therefore reliable here only insofar as they
demonstrate that the assumption of common authorship is incompatible with the
assumption that Part One was written first.
22. Philip Brockbank's unpublished doctoral thesis, "Shakespeare's Historical
Myth: Shakespeare's Adaptations of his Sources in making the Plays of Henry VI and
Richard ///" (Cambridge, 1953), claims—in defiance of the scholarly consensus—that
Holinshed was the main source for all three plays. But he concedes (30) that seven
teen of Contention's twenty-three scenes could be based upon Hall, Grafton, or
Holinshed; he claims that only one scene (Il.ii) was clearly influenced by Holinshed;
but in a footnote he acknowledges that Foxe's popular Book of Martyrs could have
provided the same information. Foxe is also one of only

the episode of the mock-miracle at Saint Albans and w
source in King John, 1 Henry IV, and All is True.
23. Leech, 90-91. (Leech does not relate Tamburlaine II to I Henry VI.)
24. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8
vols. (London: Routledge), 3: 23-41; Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's
Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), 24-26.
25. Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow; rev. ed., 5 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 1: 212.
26. Wilson, xiv-xxi; Bullough, 3: 24-25; Norman Sanders, ed., The First Part of
King Henry the Sixth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 9.
27. Robert Greene, Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance,
sig. Flv (entered in the Stationers' Register on 20 September 1592); Greene died on
3 September (Elizabethan Stage, 3: 326); Henslowe records no performances be
tween 22 June and 29 December (.Diary, 19).
28. Henslowe's Diary, 16-20. For a reconsideration of the meaning of Henslowe's
"ne," and a challenge to the view that it often covered revisions of old plays, see
Rosylyn L. Knutson, "Henlowe's Naming of Parts," Notes and Queries 228 (1983):
157-60, and "Henslowe's Diary and the Economics of Play Revision for Revival,
1592-1603," Theatre Research International 10 (1985): 1-18. Knutson's second arti
cle effectively demonstrates, on the basis of Henslowe's consistent practice, that the
entry for "Harry the vj" can hardly represent an old play substantially revised, as
scholars sometimes assume; in her first, she shows that Henslowe always identified
a "second part" as such, but often failed to specify the "first part" as such, simply
using the general title. Thus, "Harey the vj" could not be a Part Two or a Part Three,
but could easily be Part One.
29. "The Date of 2, 3 Henry VI," Shakespeare Quarterly 25 (1974): 323-34. Dray
ton's and Dekker's First Part of the Civil Wars in France was bought by Henslowe
on 29 September 1598 (Diary, 98), Part Two on 3 November (100), Part Three on 30
December (103). Drayton and Dekker thus sold three completed full-length plays
on the subject within three months (29 September-30 December). But this was a
collaboration between two playwrights with a well-established record of rapid com
position; it can hardly establish a norm for composition of the entirety of Henry VI
by a single playwright who was, by Elizabethan standards, a leisurely writer.
30. Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time,
1590-1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 229.
31. Compositor attributions for the Folio are summarized in Textual Companion,
148-54. Through-Line-Numbers are available in Charlton Hinman's The Norton Fac
simile: The First Folio of Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1968).
32. For Compositor B, see Gary Taylor, "Folio Compositors and Folio Copy: King
Lear in its Context," PBSA 79 (1985): 45-46; for Compositor A, John Jowett and
Gary Taylor, "Sprinklings of Authority: The Folio Text of Richard II," Studies in
Bibliography 38 (1985): 153. For a full account of spellings of this inteijection in the
Shakespeare canon—which shows that Shakespeare overwhelmingly preferred
"o"—see John Jowett and Gary Taylor, Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606-1623 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993), appendix I.
33. Statements about compositorial spelling preferences are based upon computer
concordances to their Folio stints; these concordances are fully described in Gary
Taylor, "The Shrinking Compositor A of the Shakespeare First Folio," Studies in
Bibliography 34 (1981): 102.
34. For a full list see Marvin Spevack, A Complete and Systematic Concordance
to the Works of Shakespeare, 9 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1975), 7:
370-71.
202 GARY TAYLOR
35. Proportions of both features decre

plays, see Textual Companion, 104-5.
36. See MacDonald P. Jackson, "Two
and 1 Henry IV (1598)," Studies in Bibliography 36 (1983): 173-90, and Textual
Companion, 329-30.
37. S. T. Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. H. Raysor; rev. ed., 2 vols.
(London: Dent, 1960), 127.
38. "The Composition of 1 Henry VI," Shakespeare Quarterly 16 (1965): 279-87.
39. "The Authorship of 1 Henry VI," 821-22.
40. Philip W. Timberlake, The Feminine Ending in English Blank Verse (Menasha:
Banta, 1931). This is the standard work on the feminine ending in Elizabethan drama
up to 1595.
41. Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: An Experiment in Pros
ody (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1960).
42. Shakespeare and the Homilies, 232-37, 254. The word counts in the remainder
of this paragraph are computer-generated; the identification of compounds is, how
ever, my own, based upon the Folio text.
43. George Russel French, Shakespeareana Genealogica (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1869), 138.
44. Bentley, 226-34.
45. The Origin and Development of "1 Henry VI" in Relation to Shakespeare,
Marlowe, Peele, and Greene (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press,
1926), 106. Gaw also has a useful discussion—much more persuasive than Dover
Wilson's—of the treatment of Winchester and Gloucester in Part One and Conten
tion, as evidence that Part One is the later play (77-82).
46. Fleay, Chronicle History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare (Lon
don: Nimmo, 1886), 258; Alfred Hart, ed., The First Part of King Henry the Sixth,
Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1909), 142. Brockbank notes that the phrase
also occurs in Holinshed, The True Tragedy of Richard III, and Troublesome
Reign (20).
47. Charlton Hinman, The Printing and Proof-Reading of the Shakespeare First
Folio, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). For Compositor A, see "Ioane" (Con
tention, TLN 721); for Compositor B, see "lone" (Love's Labour's Lost, TLN 2887,
28%; Shrew 265).
48. For Lodge see Charles W. Whitworth, Jr., "The Literary Career of Thomas
Lodge, 1579-15%" (Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham, 1978), 10-11: Lodge left
England on 26 August 1591, and cannot have returned earlier than March 1592, and
probably later. In late 1592 or early 1593, in the preface to Kind-Heart's Dream,
Chettle claimed that he did not know Shakespeare in September 1592 (when he
entered Greene's abusive pamphlet in the Stationers' Register): see the full discus
sion of these events in S. Schoenbaum, A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1977), 154-58.
49. Dates and attributions in this paragraph are taken from Alfred Harbage's
Annals of English Drama 975-1700, rev. S. Schoenbaum (London: Methuen, 1964).
Some of these educated guesses might be challenged, but the Annals remains a
useful yardstick.
50. The Pedlars Prophecy, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: Malone Society, 1914).
51. "A Source for Nashe's Terrors of the Night, and the Authorship of I Henry
VF and "The Authorship of I Henry VI (Continued)," Studies in English Literature
5 (1%5): 31-47, 269-81.
52. Harlow's argument in favor of North as the source of this passage heavily
depends upon a Folio hyphen ("rich-jewel'd Coffer"), wh

torial: Compositor A added many hyphens in other Folio
53. Hamlet II.ii.320 (Howard, H4, I2V), Macbeth IV.i. 11
IV.xiv.2-11 (Howard D3, D3V). Harlow actually strength
between Howard and I Henry VI (276).
54. "Thomas Nashe, Robert Cotton the Antiquary, and
Review of English Studies, n.s., 12 (1961): 7-23. Harlow
not in the article on 1 Henry VI) that the evidence, even
might be taken alternatively to mean that "the original wo
1592" (19).
55. Data on Summer's Last Will was compiled in part w
dance generated by the Oxford University Computing
scholars upon request).
56. On Nashe's verbal invention, see Jiirgen Schafe
O.E.D.: Shakespeare and Nashe as Test Cases (Oxford:
57. Nashe's authorship of act 1 is also urged by Joach
der Vermutung J. D. Wilson iiber den Verfasser des ers
'King Henry VI, First Part' mit Hilfe einfacher Textchar
studien aus Kybernetik und Geisteswissenschaft 6 (1965
58. The evidence of function words (described and docu
panion, 80-89) also confirms this conclusion. Unfortunat
the function-word evidence in relation to I Henry VI (
seen by examining Table 6, act 1 contains three statistica
the field of ten function words (more than any other part
deviation in its total figure (3.15) is also higher than for
play. As we point out in Companion, "any value higher
cious" (81). Indeed, this deviation is higher than that f
canon" of Shakespeare's plays; only the suspect porti
have higher deviances for any of the function word variab
(2.99) is also very high. The function word test thus st
reinforces the conclusion that Shakespeare did not wri
in discriminating authorial shares in the rest of the pla
unwise to take act 5 as a sample, since there is a good ch
by more than one of the collaborators; the evidence for A
in act 5 as in act 3.
59. "Repetition and Parallelism in the Earlier Elizabethan Drama," PMLA 20
(1905): 377.
60. For Locrine, see the Malone Society Reprint, ed. R. B. McKerrow (Oxford,
1908); act 2, scene 6 is called "The sixt Act." in the quarto (line 800); act 2, scene 7
is called "The 8. Act." (line 927).
61. "Repetition and Variation," 363.
62. Slater, Edward the Third.
63. Shakespeare's Lost Play: Edmund Ironside, ed. Eric Sams (London: Fourth
Estate, 1985).
64. See Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Res
toration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 278-83.
65. For statistics on Ironside and Edward III see Louis Ule, A Concordance to
the Shakespeare Apocrypha, 3 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1987).
66. Textual Companion, 88. (In the original version of this essay, completed in
1985 and referred to in Textual Companion, I did not attempt to relate 1 Henry VI
to Ironside or Edward III.)
204 GARY TAYLOR
67. MacDonald P. Jackson, "Editions and Textual Studies," Shakespeare Survey

40 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 226.
68. For -eth in stage directions, see Textual Companion, 329; ignoring 1 Henry
IV (eight, set from scribal copy) and two collaborative plays (three in act 1 of 1 Henry
VI, four in All is True), there are only nine further examples in the entire canon.
69. See Jackson, "Editions," 224-26, and Donald Foster's review in Shakespeare
Quarterly 39 (1988): 120-23.
70. For a summary of previous scholarship see Textual Companion, 114-15.1 did
not there take account of the implications of Sams' s argument. Sams collects the
most notable parallels between Titus and Ironside on 34-37; seventeen come from
the three suspect scenes.
71. R. F. Hill, "The Composition of Titus Andronicus," Shakespeare Survey 10
(1957): 60-70.
72. Some of these characteristics—the spelling "Oh," the infrequency of
brackets—might be scribal, since we have no other evidence of the scribe's practices.
But they could just as easily be authorial, and they are certainly compatible with
other evidence suggestive of Author Y. However, the use of -eth in verbs in stage
directions must be scribal, or must come from an author not present in 1 Henry VI.
73. See Textual Companion, 136-37.
74. Timberlake, 77-80.
75. I have not commented here upon authorship problems in Contention and Duke
of York, which are discussed briefly in Textual Companion, 111-12. Given the ab
sence of "here" in stage directions, it seems unlikely that Nashe is present in either
text. Act 3 of Contention is most clearly attributable to Shakespeare; it is worth
noting that it contains only one "ye" (to seventy occurrences of "you"). By contrast,
it is also worth noting that all eight examples of "ye" in Duke of York occur in three
scenes (V.iv-V.vi), which contain only sixteen examples of "you"; since neither
"you" nor "ye" occurs in V.iii and V.vii, an author with a 50 percent proportion of
"ye" to "you" might be responsible for the last five scenes of the play (that is,
everything after the death of Warwick). Those scenes also contain five examples of
"ne'er" (anomalously high, as noted above) and eight pairs of round brackets. It
seems more likely than not that a second hand is present in act 5 of Duke of York.
76. Shakespeare: The "Lost Years" (Manchester: University Press, 1985), 63-64;
he also provides a convenient summary of the well-known links between Strange's
and Chamberlain's Men (59). Honigmann's case for flattery of Strange in Love's
Labour's Lost (65-69) is, by contrast, unconvincing.
77. The larger the chi-square is, the greater the difference between the samples.
The test is described by Anthony Kenny in The Computation of Style: An Introduc
tion to Statistics for Students of Literature and Humanities (Oxford: Pergamon
Press, 1982).
78. For a detailed discussion of these other kinds of evidence, and of the chronol
ogy of the Shakespeare canon generally, see Textual Companion, "Canon and Chro
nology." Readers may wish to correct a handful of errors (in calculation, and in the
presentation of figures) in that discussion, which have been pointed out by Thomas
Merriam, "Taylor's statistics in A Textual Companion," Notes and Queries 234
(1989): 341-42; however, those errors do not affect the conclusions. By contrast to
the corrections made by Merriam, the fevered criticisms of "Canon and Chronology"
in Vickers's review—cited in note 10 above—are based upon innumeracy, ignorance
of the relevant scholarship, and misrepresentation. For instance, it is simply not true
that Table 9 conflates evidence from "a very miscellaneous group of scholars"; it
includes a number of features which have been discussed by previous scholars, but
all the figures are based upon new counts of the data (as can be seen by even a
cursory comparison of the figures). Moreover, the colloq

strates that a cumulative index of such features is a m
chronology than any one feature tested in isolation; it is t
for Vickers to point to occasional absurdities produced b
they invalidated the cumulative one; the cumulative ind
such random fluctuations in a single indicator. (This is
principle.) Likewise, the various metrical tests (Table 1
presented side by side; the discrepancies between the v
edged, and in discussions of the dating of individual pla
metrical statistics when several different indicators concur. Vickers's review is an
exemplary instance of reactionary ideology masquerading as a proper scholarly
scepticism.
79. See Gary Taylor, "The Folio Copy for Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello,"
Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983): 44-61; idem, "Folio Compositors and Folio
Copy," 66-67.
80. Statements about Folio copy reflect the conclusions in Textual Companion;
for a tabular summary, see 145-47.
81. For figures on round brackets in the manuscript and printed texts of Orlando,
I am indebted to Randall McLeod.

Shakespeare and Others - The Authorship of 1 Henry VI

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Shakespeare and Others - The Authorship of 1 Henry VI

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp DBA Associated University Presses

MOST postwar critics, in defiance of a consensus that lasted for two ce

VI was entirely Shakespeare's. Ironically, Tillyard (who dismissed t

The faith in Shakespeare's authorship of the whole of Part One rests

Henry VI plays. For Shakespeare's authorship of Part One we

evidence suggests that it might be collaborative—even before we have

pattern of composition remarkably similar to the historical norm. A

We know of no other play about Talbot (who would be a relatively obscure

of a line in Duke of York presumes its familiarity; no one supposes t

remarkably helpful in distinguishing the work of some authors. In

Compositors Spelling Frequency Reference

Compositors Spelling Frequency Reference

B Puc. (prefixes) 9 IV.vii-V.vi

The handful of anomalous variants can be quickly dismissed: "Pue." at TLN

acts 1 (cardinal) from acts 3 to 5 (bishop); the treatment of the interjection

Z (act 1): cardinal/"0'7"Puzel"/no scene divisions

Here Alarum, they are beaten by the

Act Lines -eth

Act Verse lines -ed

Play -ed -eth Verse words Proportion

appear to be due to the Folio compositors. Act 1 contains no round brackets,

So far, act 1 is the tidiest of these attributions. Although we cannot yet

Talbot's fatal siege of Bourdeaux (IV.ii-vii). Noticeably, Mincoff

IV.vii.32, 22 percent have feminine endings—a proportion strikingl

The "Shakespeare" passages produce the sharp "valley" pattern

Pause after 4th 82 398

36,1.viii.9, Il.ii. 15, III.vii.69), and only twice unmistakably disyllab

Z (act 1): O, Puzel, -ed, -eth, ne'er, no brackets, here

As this summary makes clear, W is clearly differentiated from both Y and

W (Il.i—Il.iii, II.v, IV.i): O/Oh, brackets frequent, infrequent feminine

appears significant, the contrast depends—like those in the treatment of

Shakespeare while admitting its stylistic inconsistency: the play is

play's structure, by the earlier introduction of Plantagenet, Warwick, and

The "evidence" to support this premise consists almost entirely of

Significant quantities of nonsense have been generated by scholars intent

of identification we must initially assume that each anonymous pl

passages in Nashe's acknowledged work. Clearly, such linguistic "evidence"

1593. This argument depends upon Harlowe's own speculative redat

1580-95 which provide parallels: Tamburlaine I, Tamburlaine II

No one should regard Marlowe as a serious candidate for the authorship

Titus Andronicus and 1 Henry VI.63 In short, existing scholar

the parallels he has observed between Ironside, 1 Henry VI, and Ti

12 "my father's conquest"/IV.i.l48 "the conquest of my father" (W)

493-4 "base . . . peasant"/V.vi.7-9, 21-22 "base . . . peasant" (Y)

730 "Ha ha ha. Why laughest thou?'7II.ii.42-43 "Ha ha ha. Laughest

757/III.i. 157 "of force" (Y)

905/IV.i.35 "full of haughty courage" (W)

1098 "partners of your woes"/III.v.51 "partner of your . . . woe" (Y)

Clearly, this list is dominated by parallels with the Author Y scenes of 1

the unidentified Author Y of parts of 1 Henry VI was also the main

Instead of attempting such an investigation—which would, in any case,

Iain's Men can be traced back to Strange's Men in unambiguous documents

Compositor Brackets Words in Stint Words per bracket

The only apparent exception to this rule is Winter's Tale:

But for this play it is

SHR B 19 13795 726

We should hardly exp

Brackets Words Printer Words per bracket

The figures for the Sonnets in

ERRORS B 6 7507 *1251

n •iv.l what means this silence (Richard III III.vii.28)

23 so evident (Coriolanus IV.vii.52, Winter's Tale II.ii.41)

IV.iv.6 sully all his gloss (Kinsmen I.ii.5)

IV.v.8 unavoided danger (Richard II II.i.268)