thinnest in thought, the least harmonious in rhythm in a word, the least Shakespearean of them all") is to be found that resembles Marlowe and Peele, especially the latter. We may readily agree that when writing "Richard III" Shakespeare had not yet found his most truly original style and manner, of which the first full exemplification is to be found in "Richard II"; his processes were still in a large measure imitative; but it is a long step from this and a step which I for one decline to take to argue that "Richard III" was not essentially his own handiwork.

I am willing, as I stated above, to allow it to be quite possible that Marlowe and Greene, the latter more especially, contributed to the "Contention" and the “True Tragedie," and that Peele may conceivably also have had a hand in them. But while I see no reason for attributing the conception of Richard of Gloucester to Peele - from whose hand we have no character approaching this in. dramatic force - I am less disposed than I formerly was to consider a revision by or with the coöperation of Marlowe to be an assumption necessary in order to account for the revision of the two old plays which transformed them into the Second and Third Parts of " Henry VI." This assumption implies another to which I cannot bring myself to assent, viz., that Shakespeare's 'prentice hand, fortified by his consciousness of what was to follow-"Richard III" was unequal to the task of the revision of the two old plays, if (as we certainly cannot prove) this task was imposed upon him. The belief that Shakespeare, although a beginner, was capable of accomplishing it, by no means contradicts the probability that a strong influence was exercised upon Shakespeare as the revisor of the Second and Third Parts of " Henry VI," and as the writer of“ Rich

ard III," by Marlowe, and also by Peele. In the former case the probability is indeed to all intents and purposes a certainty. Marlowe the one great imaginative poet among the predecessors of Shakespeare - the one dramatic poet in whom there burnt the fire of passion, and whose thoughts were winged with aspirations that made them soar into the infinite- the one Promethean soul in face of an Olympus of limited ambitions - how could such a writer have left unaffected and uninfluenced the most receptive, the most intelligent, the most sympathetic of his younger contemporaries? Or was Shakespeare not great enough to absorb into his creative activity the spirit of Marlowe as Goethe in his period of Storm and Stress absorbed into his genius the spirit- far less powerful than Marlowe's - of a Klinger or a Lenz? That is the question which those who are, like myself, unwilling to assume a direct coöperation of Marlowe with Shakespeare in this "revision are unwilling to answer by a timid negative. For my part, I am still unable to see why the Second and Third Parts of "Henry VI" are not, together with the First, to be legitimately included, as Hemynge and Condell included them, among the works of Shakespeare- and this in a sense in which they could be included among the works of no other English dramatist.

A. W. WARD.

THE THIRD PART OF

KING HENRY VI

KING HENRY the Sixth.

EDWARD, PRINCE OF WALES, his son.

LEWIS XI. KING OF FRANCE.

DUKE OF SOMERSET.

DUKE OF EXETER.

EARL OF OXFORD.

EARL OF NORTHUMBERLAND.

EARL OF WESTMORELAND.

LORD CLIFFORD.

RICHARD PLANTAGENET, Duke of York.

EDWARD, Earl of March, afterwards King Edward IV.,

LADY GREY, afterwards Queen to Edward IV.

BONA, sister to the French Queen.

Soldiers, Attendants, Messengers, Watchmen, &c.

SCENE: England and France

1 This play was first printed in its present form in the First Folio of 1623. But it had already been published in an unrevised draft in 1595 under the title of The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke, and the Death of good King Henrie the Sixth, in a quarto volume, which was reprinted in 1600 and 1619. The Quartos have no divisions into acts or scenes. The Folio has the single heading at the opening of the play, Actus Primus Scona Prima." Rowe inserted in 1709 full division into "' and acts scenes," a list of the dramatis persons," and indications of the "Scene."

Alarum. Enter the DUKE OF YORK, EDWARD, RICHARD, NORFOLK, MONTAGUE, WARWICK, and Soldiers

WARWICK

Charged our main battle's front, and breaking in
Were by the swords of common soldiers slain.

1 I wonder... hands] The dramatist represents the events of this scene as immediately following the battle of St. Albans, May 23, 1455,