ant episode of the
play in its unrevised state. Now the proposition that Shakespeare was
the sole author of both plays in their earliest extant shape is refuted
at once and equally from without and from within, by evidence of
tradition and by evidence of style. There is therefore proof
irresistible and unmistakable of at least a double authorship; and the
one reasonable conclusion left to us would seem to be this; that the
first edition we possess of these plays is a partial transcript of the
text as it stood after the first additions had been made by Shakespeare
to the original work of Marlowe and others; for that this original was
the work of more hands than one, and hands of notably unequal power, we
have again the united witness of traditional and internal evidence to
warrant our belief: and that among the omissions of this imperfect text
were certain passages of the original work, which were ultimately
restored in the final revision of the entire poem as it now stands among
the collected works of Shakespeare.

No competent critic who has given due study to the genius of Marlowe will
admit that there is a single passage of tragic or poetic interest in
either form of the text, which is beyond the reach of the father of
English tragedy: or, if there be one seeming exception in the expanded
and transfigured version of Clifford's monologue over his father's
corpse, which is certainly more in Shakespeare's tragic manner than in
Marlowe's, and in the style of a later period than that in which he was
on the whole apparently content to reproduce or to emulate the tragic
manner of Marlowe, there is at least but this one exception to the
general and absolute truth of the rule; and even this great tragic
passage is rather out of the range of Marlowe's style than beyond the
scope of his genius. In the later as in the earlier version of these
plays, the one manifest excellence of which we have no reason to suppose
him capable is manifest in the comic or prosaic scenes alone. The first
great rapid sketch of the dying cardinal, afterwards so nobly enlarged
and perfected on revision by the same or by a second artist, is as
clearly within the capacity of Marlowe as of Shakespeare; and in either
edition of the latter play, successively known as _The True Tragedy of
Richard Duke of York_, as the _Second Part of the Contention_, and as the
_Third Part of King Henry VI_., the dominant figure which darkens all the
close of the poem w