'This historical play might have been one of our author's earliest dramatick efforts; and almost every young poet begins his career by imitation. Shakspeare therefore, till he felt his own strength, perhaps servilely conformed to the style and manner of his predecessors.'[1] Charles Knight in the Pictorial Shakspeare (1867) asserted with much greater positiveness that all the three parts of Henry VI 'are, in the strictest sense of the word, Shakspeare's own plays,' and was followed by the American critics, Verplanck (1847) and Hudson.[2] Such has been the view almost unanimously of the Germans: Schlegel, Bodenstedt, Delius, Ulrici, Sarrazin, Brandl, Creizenach (Gervinus is the honorable exception). The only recent British scholar to espouse this cause is, I believe, Courthope,[3] who in a remarkable Appendix 'On the Authenticity of Some of the Early Plays Assigned to Shakespeare and their Relationship to the Development of his Dramatic Genius' (History
- ↑ Capell also should apparently be included among the believers in Shakespeare's exclusive authorship. In his introduction he anticipates and very quaintly develops the idea of Steevens's second sentence: 'We are quite in the dark as to when the first part was written; but should be apt to conjecture, that it was some considerable time after the other two; and perhaps when those two were retouched. . . . And those two parts, even with all their retouchings, being still much inferior to the other plays of that class, he may reasonably [sic] be supposed to have underwrit himself on purpose in the first, that it might the better match with those it belong'd to.'
- ↑ 'I can but give it as my firm and settled judgment that the main body of the play is certainly Shakespeare's; nor do I perceive any clear and decisive reason for calling in another hand to account for any part of it.'
- ↑ Note, however, the historian Gairdner's passing remark (Studies in English History, 1881, 65): 'I dismiss altogether the hypothesis which some have advanced, that the First Part of Henry VI was not really Shakespeare's. So far as internal evidence goes, if in ability it be not equal to Shakespeare's best, it is too great for any other writer.'
