been old men or have died at the time the last must be dated. But also the playwrights did not care about the actual sequence of events, and the historical order of events is unnecessarily disarranged in the play.
(2) The characters neither develop, nor are they consistent. An illustration of the first point may be found in the treatment of the character of Henry himself. In 1520, the date of the opening of the play, he was twenty-nine years old, in the full vigor of his young manhood, athletic, fond of pleasure, and still tricked by the external; in 1544, the latest date in the play, he was old, sick, with an indomitable will and a shrewd sense that made him the most powerful personality in Europe. But the King Henry of the play is the same from the first act to the fifth. This may be due to the fact that the writers are frankly disregarding the lapse of time. The explanation for the inconsistency of the characters is quite different. The best illustration of this is to be found in the character of Wolsey. The fallen Wolsey of Act III has little in common with the arrogant prelate that plotted the fall of Buckingham. In Act III he is a heroic character with whose misfortunes the audience sympathizes; in Act I he is a tyrant, and there is no attempt to bridge this gap. These opposing interpretations of the same person are to be found in the original authority. Holinshed's work is not a history in the modern sense. A modern historian studies the period, determines the relative values of the various incidents, and presents us with a unified interpretation of the events. But this is not the method of the old chroniclers. Holinshed copies previous writers, stating the fact in the margin, but he makes no attempt to reconcile them. For the character of Wolsey he relies first upon the narrative of Polydore Vergil. The latter was an Italian who came to England about 1501. He got into trouble with
