eld of Shakespearean
controversy.

There can be few serious students of Shakespeare who have not sometimes
felt that possibly the hardest problem involved in their study is that
which requires for its solution some reasonable and acceptable theory as
to the play of _King Henry VIII_. None such has ever yet been offered;
and I certainly cannot pretend to supply one. Perhaps however it may be
possible to do some service by an attempt to disprove what is untenable,
even though it should not be possible to produce in its stead any
positive proof of what we may receive as matter of absolute faith.

The veriest tiro in criticism who knows anything of the subject in hand
must perceive, what is certainly not beyond a schoolboy's range of
vision, that the metre and the language of this play are in great part so
like the language and the metre of Fletcher that the first and easiest
inference would be to assume the partnership of that poet in the work. In
former days it was Jonson whom the critics and commentators of their time
saw good to select as the colleague or the editor of Shakespeare; but a
later school of criticism has resigned the notion that the fifth act was
retouched and adjusted by the author of _Volpone_ to the taste of his
patron James. The later theory is more plausible than this; the primary
objection to it is that it is too facile and superficial. It is waste of
time to point out with any intelligent and imaginative child with a
tolerable ear for metre who had read a little of the one and the other
poet could see for himself--that much of the play is externally as like
the usual style of Fletcher as it is unlike the usual style of
Shakespeare. The question is whether we can find one scene, one speech,
one passage, which in spirit, in scope, in purpose, bears the same or any
comparable resemblance to the work of Fletcher. I doubt if any man more
warmly admires a poet whom few can have studied more thoroughly than I;
and to whom, in spite of all sins of omission and commission,--and many
and grievous they are, beyond the plenary absolution of even the most
indulgent among critical confessors--I constantly return with a fresh
sense of attraction, which is constantly rewarded by a fresh sense of
gratitude and delight. It is assuredly from no wish to pluck a leaf from
his laurel, which has no need of foreign grafts or stolen garlands from
the loftier growth of Shakespeare's, that I venture to question his
ca