Coleridge doubted
whether Shakespeare had had anything to do with the "First Part of Henry
VI.," but his fellow-actors, Heminge and Condell, placed the Three Parts
of "King Henry VI." in the first collected edition of Shakespeare's
plays, and our latest criticism finds good reasons to justify this
contemporary judgement. Mr. Swinburne writes: "The last battle of Talbot
seems to me as undeniably the master's work as the scene in the Temple
Gardens, or the courtship of Margaret by Suffolk"; and it would be easy
to prove that much of what the dying Mortimer says is just as certainly
Shakespeare's work as any of the passages referred to by Mr. Swinburne.
Like most of those who are destined to reach the heights, Shakespeare
seems to have grown slowly, and even at twenty-eight or thirty years of
age his grasp of character was so uncertain, his style so little formed,
so apt to waver from blank verse to rhyme, that it is difficult to
determine exactly what he did write. We may take it, I think, as certain
that he wrote more than we who have his mature work in mind are inclined
to ascribe to him.
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