Parts: And newly corrected and enlarged. Written by William Shakespeare, Gent.' The corrections and enlargements here announced are relatively inessential, and the earlier part of the Whole Contention amounts to no more than a new edition of the Quarto of 1594, though the publisher's intention was evidently to imply that it contained the large additions by Shakespeare which actually first appeared in the text of 2 Henry VI in the Shakespeare Folio of 1623.
The close plot relationship between the First Part of the Contention and the True Tragedy makes it fairly evident that the former play was produced, as we know the latter to have been, by the Earl of Pembroke's Company before that company disbanded in 1598. This troupe had recently acted Marlowe's Edward II, and, if the inferences of recent scholars are correct, was at the moment employing Shakespeare's services both as actor and as playwright. Professor J. Q. Adams suggests that Shakespeare's initial revision of the First Part of the Contention and of the True Tragedy was made (in 1592) in order to enable the Pembroke Company to present them in competition with the original version of 1 Henry VI (by Peele?), which was at this time proving a great success at the rival theatre of Lord Strange's Men.[1]
We have little knowledge of the stage history of 2 Henry VI between the time it was amplified out of the earlier First Part of the Contention and the Restoration era. The Epilogue to Shakespeare's Henry V (1599) indicates that the Henry VI plays had been popular:
'Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown'd King
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
- ↑ Cf. J. Q. Adams, A Life of William Shakespeare, 1923, pp. 186, 187, and the edition of 1 Henry VI in the present series, pp. 133, 151 ff.
