Page:Henry VI Part 1 (1918) Yale.djvu/155

King Henry the Sixth they are cloy'd With long continuance in a settled place' (II. v. 104-106); 'To wall thee from the liberty of flight' (IV. ii. 24); 'girdled with a waist of iron' (IV. iii. 20); 'ring'd about with bold adversity' (IV. iv. 14); 'Now thou art seal'd the son of chivalry' (IV. vi. 29); 'To save a paltry life and slay bright fame' (IV. vi. 45); 'Triumphant death, smear'd with captivity' (IV. vii. 3); 'inhearsed in the arms Of the most bloody nurser of his harms' (IV. vii. 46); 'Twinkling another counterfeited beam' (V. iii. 63).

Consideration of the passages just cited, which are fairly representative, though of course not complete, will, I think, suggest a gradual decrease through the scenes concerned in the recognizable Shakespearean quality. The Temple Garden and Mortimer scenes are rather more positively like Shakespeare than the blank verse Talbot passages, and decidedly more so than the rimed Talbot passages (IV. iii. 28–46, IV. v. 16–vii. 50) or the Suffolk—Margaret scene. This is reasonable, since the first two scenes bear most appearance of being spontaneous with the reviser of the play, and since Shakespeare's language is regularly bolder in blank verse than in rime.

It would be hazardous to attempt to infer from the style alone the date at which Shakespeare wrote his scenes. The diction does not seem to me that of the poet's earliest period; and Furnivall has observed that the proportion of extra-syllabled lines in the Temple Garden scene (about 26 per cent) 'forbids us supposing it is very early work.' It would also be ill-advised to set precise limits for Shakespeare's part in the play. His hand is most evident in the scenes just discussed, but Talbot's death must, I think, have been a conspicuous feature of the original pre-Shakespearean play, and it is unlikely that the reviser here removed all traces of his predecessor. On 