In this somewhat thin-spun and
evidently hasty play a servile fidelity to the text of Virgil's
narrative has naturally resulted in the failure which might have been
expected from an attempt at once to transcribe what is essentially
inimitable and to reproduce it under the hopelessly alien conditions of
dramatic adaptation. The one really noble passage in a generally feeble
and incomposite piece of work is, however, uninspired by the
unattainable model to which the dramatists have been only too obsequious
in their subservience.
It is as nearly certain as anything can be which depends chiefly upon
cumulative and collateral evidence that the better part of what is best
in the serious scenes of "King Henry VI." is mainly the work of Marlowe.
That he is, at any rate, the principal author of the second and third
plays passing under that name among the works of Shakespeare, but first
and imperfectly printed as "The Contention between the two Famous Houses
of York and Lancaster," can hardly be now a matter of debate among
competent judges. The crucial difficulty of criticism in this matter is
to determine, if indeed we should not rather say to conjecture, the
authorship of the humorous scenes in prose, showing as they generally do
a power of comparatively high and pure comic realism to which nothing in
the acknowledged works of any pre-Shakespearean dramatist is even
remotely comparable.
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