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dies York, fulfilling the Queen's re- least delightful or the least classical

venge,-

So York may overlook the town of York! But his death only serves to quicken the Plantagenet tune of Mortimer's Cross; and "this brave town of York," Towton and Saxton continue the martial strain until it dies away in King Henry's meditation on the shepherd's life, whose days and years

Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave. The homely curds and the "cold thin drink" of the shepherd do not make the

touches in this dire Yorkshire pastoral. No doubt Marlowe wrote it, and a greater than he rewrote it.

The next act paints King Henry in retreat very much as Marlowe painted Edward II. England is everything now, and France under new aspects and King Lewis and Lady Bona hardly justify themselves dramatically while we spoil for the final bloody triumph of the House of York. The total emergence of Richard of Gloster reminds us next that without him and his elemental energy, converting all the forces, cross-purposes, and con

fusions of petty revenge into one crowning idea, the latter half of part three, poor as it often is, would be poor indeed.

If we try now to recall our impressions of the whole trilogy, we shall find that if one voice besides Shakespeare's is dominant, it is Marlowe's. There are lines, passages, effects, and phrases in all three parts, which he and only he could have written. It may be an echo of a stage Damascus in the siege of Orleans, or a lurking reminder of a Soldan or an Eastern prince in the mouth of a Dauphin, calling up without any specific rally of resemblances an illusion or a sentence, some persistent, dimly reminiscent line, which must be his :

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My lusty western lads! Matrevers, thou
Sound proudly here a perfect point of war
In honour of thy sovereign's safe return
Thus Longshanks bids his soldiers Bien

O Mahomet! O Sleepy Mahomet! But from Marlowe in his careless vein it is not easy to detach Greene and Peele. O Younger than they, he was that latecomer who can give the wasted night its

new lease of time, enlarge its fellowship, and turn an orgy into a feast. Greene had more lyric ease, more humor too; but in the theatre he was lazy. When he felt his blank verse growing monotonous, he simply relaxed its beat, or evaded its laws by slipping a line at random. And Peele again had no end of faculty, but as a dramatist he could never get outside his own door, as the saying used to be. Marlowe had an epic imagination, and with it he had fully twice the dramatic genius of the other two. He was built for heroic song, a blow ended each line, he wrought blank verse in bars of gold or iron; but weld them malleably as his great successor welded them, he could not; and he did not live to learn, as he must have done, that mastery.

Turn now, however, and summon up those who were lesser than he, and who undoubtedly helped to write these Henry VI. plays. Set Peele and Greene beside him. Which is responsible for the "statelier pyramids than Rhodope's," or the coffer of Darius? This is not the London gossip's voice, nor is it Shakespeare's.

Turn again to what you may call the "Old England" note, and the martial tune heard here, and heard still louder in Henry V. It was not Shakespeare who first set it going. Of what does it remind you? Of Greene's Friar Bacon, who will so strengthen England by his skill,

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Or of Marlowe's Edward the Second:
But if proud Mortimer do wear this crown
Heaven turn it to a blaze of quenchless fire!
Or like the snaky wreath of Tisiphon,
Engirt the temples of his hateful head;
So shall not England's vine be perished,
But Edward's name survive, though Edward
dies.

The poetic life of any one of these passages is far greater than that of the average level of Henry VI. The individuality of their writers is distinct, their power unmistakable. And recognizing it, we easily understand how the scientific critic may be tempted to dissect the patchwork of the original plays, and assign a piece to this one, and a particular tag or thread or bit of color to another. But when all is marked off that can be distributed in this way, there remains in the continual texture a something of Marlowe and a something more of Shakespeare, that is not to be denied. A shred here, a sudden inflation of the lines there, though not remarkable otherwise for any extraordinary grace or force, make up with a hundred other minor details a total effect which is different to that made in any distinct play of Marlowe's, and certainly very different to anything by Greene and Peele. It is, however, like enough to the general Shakespearian effeet to pass current in the popular acceptance, freely colored as it is by reflec

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