When harey met Shakespeare : the genesis of the first part of Henry the Sixth

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.