Abstract:
This thesis investigates the complex genesis of the play printed in the Shakespeare First
Folio of 1623 as The first Part of Henry the Sixt. The Introduction identifies the tendency
of previous scholars to minimise uncertainty in their chronological and authorship
hypotheses for the play, and anchors the present study in the wider context of authorship
theory and attribution studies. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the external and internal
evidence for the play’s date, and deliberately avoid any speculation on its authorship in
order to present the chronological evidence as objectively as possible. I demonstrate in
Chapter 2 that it is only by carrying out a full structural analysis of the play that we can
hope to disentangle and accurately appraise the various revision theories put forward by
scholars over the centuries. Chapter 3 attempts, by means of a preliminary bibliographical
analysis of the Folio text, to reconstruct the nature of the manuscript copy set into type by
the Folio compositors. In Chapter 4 I conduct the first comprehensive assessment of Gary
Taylor’s groundbreaking 1995 authorship hypothesis for the play and modify it
significantly. The degree to which we are able to identify ‘who wrote what’ in the play is
the concern of Chapter 5, where I conclude that The first Part of Henry the Sixt is
Shakespeare’s revision of the play that appears in Philip Henslowe’s Diary as ‘harey the
vj’; a play written by Thomas Nashe (Act 1) and an anonymous playwright (Acts 2–5) for
Lord Strange’s company and first performed at the Rose theatre on 3 March 1592.