Page:Henry VI Part 1 (1918) Yale.djvu/163

King Henry the Sixth tory drama are notably characteristic, and evidence a method entirely unlike that of this play. He nowhere exhibits any tendency toward patriotic themes or any interest in the facts of history. Rather in his quasi-historic plays, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and James IV (and in George-a-Greene if it be his), he yields to an apparently irresistible devotion for pastoral woodland settings, romantic love stories, quaint supernaturalism, and clownish roguery. Unless one can fancy Joan's brief address to her fiends (V. iii. 1–24) to be akin in atmosphere or purpose to the magic humbuggery of Bacon and the fairy machinery of Oberon, 1 Henry VI is wholly unlike Greene in all these points. It is unlike him both in the inflexibility with which it harps on the historical note, and in its absence of humor, sentiment, or pathos. Greene, of course, may have written the play, but it is less like his avowed work than that of any contemporary dramatist.

It is not by a process of elimination merely that I arrive at George Peele as the most likely author of the old Harry the Sixth play. Indications of several kinds point in Peele's direction. He was at the time the work was produced distinctly the most conspicuous exponent of jingoistic national pride—a trait of which Marlowe shows absolutely nothing and Greene hardly more. Peele had composed the patriotic masques to celebrate the Lord Mayoralty of Sir Wolstan Dixie in 1585 and of Sir William Web in 1591. His Polyhymnia (1590) lauded in martial strains 'the honourable Triumph at Tilt' when Sir Henry Lea formally resigned his post of Queen's Champion, and he again touched the same theme in Anglorum Feriae (1595), written in honor of the thirty-seventh anniversary of Elizabeth's accession.

