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Page 2
"I entirely agree with Dr. Johnson with respect to the time when these
additional lines were inserted.... I suspect they were added in 1613,
after Shakspeare had quitted the stage, by that hand which tampered
with the other parts of the play so much as to have rendered the
versification of it of a different colour from all the other plays of
Shakspeare."--_Malone._
"If the reviver of this play (or tamperer with it, as he is called by
Mr. Malone) had so much influence over its numbers as to have entirely
changed their texture, he must be supposed to have new-woven the
substance of the whole piece; a fact almost incredible."--_Steevens._
The double character of Wolsey drawn by Queen Katherine and her
attendant, is a piece of vigorous writing of which any other author but
Shakspeare might have been proud; and the celebrated farewell of the
Cardinal, with his exhortation to Cromwell, only wants that quickening,
that vital something which the poet could have breathed into it, to be
truly and almost incomparably great.
"Our own conviction is that Shakspeare wrote a portion only of this
play.
"It cannot for a moment be supposed that any alteration of Shakspeare's
text would be necessary, or would be allowed; as little is it to be
supposed that Shakspeare would commence a play in his old-accustomed,
various, and unequalled verse, and finish it in the easy, but somewhat
lax and familiar, though not inharmonious numbers of a reverent
disciple."--_Tyas's Shakspeare_, vol. iii. p. 441.
At the same time I made the following notes from Coleridge:--
"Classification, 1802.
3rd Epoch. Henry VIII. Gelegenheitsgedicht.
Classification, 1819.
3rd Epoch. Henry VIII., a sort of historical masque, or show-play."
"It (the historical drama) must likewise be poetical; that only, I
mean, must be taken which is the permanent in our nature, which is
common, and therefore deeply interesting to all ages."--_Lit. Rem._,
vol. ii. p.160.
What is said in this last extract might be applied (as Coleridge, I feel no
doubt, had he gone one step farther into the subject, would have applied
it) to the Shakspearian drama generally; and tried by this test _Henry
VIII._ must certainly be found wanting.
Before I conclude I am anxious to make an observation with regard to the
extract from Mr. Emerson's _Representative Men_ (vol. ii. p. 307.). The
essay from which this is taken, I presume to be the same, in a printed
form, as a lecture which I heard that gentleman deliver. With abundant
powers to form a judgment for himself, I should say that his mind had never
been directed to questions of this nature. Accident, perhaps, had drawn his
attention to the style of _Henry VIII._; but, with reference to the general
subject, he had received implicitly and unquestioned the conclusions of
authorities who have represented Shakspeare as the greatest borrower,
plagiarist, and imitator that all time has brought forth. This, however,
did not shake his faith in the poet's greatness; and to reconcile what to
some would appear contradictory positions, he proposes the fact, I might
say the truism, that the greatest man is not the most original, but the
"most indebted" man. This, in the sense in which it is true, is saying no
more than that the educated man is better than the savage; but, in the
apologetic sense intended, it is equivalent to affirming that the greatest
thief is the most respectable man. Confident in this morality, he assumes a
previous play to Shakspeare's; but it appears to me that he relies too much
upon the "cadence" of the lines: otherwise I could not account for his
_selecting_ as an "autograph" a scene that, to my mind, bears
"unmistakeable traits" of Fletcher's hand, and that, by whomsoever written,
is about the weakest in the whole play.
It is a branch of the subject which I have not yet fully considered; but
MR. SPEDDING will observe that the view I take does not interfere with the
supposition that Fletcher revised the play, {403} with additions for its
revival in 1613; a task for the performance of which he would probably have
the consent of his early master.
SAMUEL HICKSON.
* * * * *
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