Page:Henry VIII (1925) Yale.djvu/163

The Life of King Henry the Eighth kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale.'

There are other contemporary allusions to the famous fire, but the foregoing are the most precise. Thus there is no question that the Globe was set on fire during the performance of a play dealing with the reign of Henry VIII. Although there were other plays centering around Henry VIII at this time, the probability is that the particular play is, certainly for the most part, the one we have. Contemporary verses mention both Heminges and Condell as being the actors in it; and Heminges and Condell ten years later printed our play as belonging to the Shakespearean repertoire. In 1623 they could scarcely have forgotten the play that had proved so disastrous to them. If this is the play, either Sir Henry Wotton was mistaken about the title, or it was advertised under an alternative title All is True, and the lines of the Prologue may allude to this alternative title. There are two slight corroborative details. In Act I, scene iv (l. 49), a stage direction reads 'chambers discharged'; the Globe would seem, then, to have burned at the end of the first act. And the 'business' of the part of King Henry was said after the Restoration to have been handed down from Shakespeare himself.

The suggestion of Chambers and others that it was an old play revamped does not seem probable. Sir Henry Wotton speaks of it as a 'new play.' This seems borne out by internal evidence. The play apparently was thrown together hurriedly, without much planning, to meet some emergency. What that emer-