These questions can be only briefly treated here.[1] The First Part of the Contention is either a particularly rough and unfinished work, or it has been very unfaithfully represented in the published versions. It contains a little less than two thousand lines, of which only about 1250 may be scanned as pentameter verse. In such a case arguments based upon elaborate stylistic analysis are more than usually dangerous. That Marlowe, however, was largely responsible for the play seems now to be the general belief. Evidence of many kinds points to his authorship: (1) the powerful, if rude, singleness and consistency of plot conception; (2) the predominance of Marlovian types of character, boisterous and self-assertive, like York, Suffolk, Queen Margaret, the Duchess Eleanor, Cardinal Beaufort, Warwick, and Cade; (3) a remarkably numerous and striking series of verbal parallels with passages in Marlowe's accepted writings; (4) metrical evidence, which shows the author of the uncorrupted verse portions of the play to have had many of Marlowe's most characteristic peculiarities of poetic style.
The theory that the Contention contains, besides Marlowe's work, scenes by other writers, such as Greene, Peele, or Shakespeare himself, has given rise to much discussion. Particularly in regard to the partly humorous scenes in the fourth act, in which Cade and his followers figure, there has been manifested an unwillingness to credit Marlowe's authorship and a desire to recognize that of Shakespeare.[2]
- ↑ They are discussed more fully in a monograph on The Authorship of the Second and Third Parts of King Henry VI, Conn. Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1912.
- ↑ Cf. J. Q. Adams, A Life of William Shakespeare, p. 137: 'The plays (i.e. The First Part of the Contention and True Tragedy) show unmistakable signs of Shakespeare's workmanship.' Ibid., p. 136, note 3: 'There is no ground for the supposition that Greene had a share in these plays. . . . On the other hand, it seems quite possible that George Peele was associated with Marlowe in their composition.'
