Page:Henry VI Part 1 (1918) Yale.djvu/134

122 the year 1593,' i.e., his renunciation of Protestantism.

 I do remember how my father said. Malone acutely cited this line in defence of his contention that this play is not by Shakespeare or by the author of the early versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI. The author of the present play, he argued, did not know that Henry VI was a nine-months' infant when his father died. Shakespeare did know this (cf. Epilogue to Henry V), and so did the author of the True Tragedy (3 Henry VI), neither of whom could therefore have written Part I. On the other hand, it might be explained that we have here one of Shakespeare's purposeful tamperings with dramatic time. There is an advantage in making the King appear older than he really was without reminding the reader that the whole long time from infancy to maturity has elapsed since the play began (with the funeral of Henry V).

 We here create you Earl of Shrewsbury. Talbot was thus ennobled in 1442, eleven years after the coronation of Henry, to which the king invites him in the next line.

 'By the ancient common law striking in the king's court of justice, or drawing a sword therein, was a capital felony.' (Blackstone.)

 Henneman notes the 'curious relation' which this scene bears to the previous one (III. iv). 'Both have the King in Paris; both have identically the same actors; both have the same two situations, viz., Talbot's interview with the King, and the quarrel of Vernon and Basset, the followers respectively of York and Somerset. But the second scene is developed far beyond the former, and the spirit of the two is equally different. One is condensed and compressed; the other elaborated and heightened by fresh details.' Annotators have observed that when Henry VI was