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In a survey of theories about Shakespeare’s early acting company affiliations, the most popular was the belief that Shakespeare performed with Lord Strange’s Men. This chapter attempts to find evidence or circumstances that suggest a possible connection of Shakespeare with Lord Strange’s Men. One example is 1 Henry VI, which shows signs of collaborative authorship of the play.

Chapter 1 asks how a history play remembers the pre-Reformation past. It focuses on 1 Henry VI, a drama that interrogates its own historicity; its characters (like its dramatists) continually confront the problem of what's gone before. Remembering the past had become particularly problematic in the post-Reformation era, when the nation's stories about itself had to be retold in order to cope with the major redraft of the Reformation. 1 Henry VI organizes the past in anachronistically denominational terms, but it simultaneously complicates this same epistemological order. Opposing the French ‘papist’ Joan la Pucelle with the English proto-Protestant Talbot, the play explores the phenomenological differences that emerge through sectarian division, differences that also problematize the mechanics of theatre. Most likely the product of authorial collaboration, this major Elizabethan hit raises representational problems that Shakespeare will continue to wrestle with throughout his career.

For various reasons, attempts to establish ‘who wrote what’ have lost their former allure. The Cambridge editors of A Funeral Elegy, Titus Andronicus, 1 Henry VI, and Timon of Athens regard Shakespeare as sole author. Those who have disagreed with them are stigmatized as ‘dinstegrators’. Motivated by a bardolatrous desire to exculpate Shakespeare from supposed weaknesses of style, structure, or dramaturgy that, on more expert scrutiny, may be redefined as strengths, being integral to an overall design. If in authorship studies one function of analysis is division, as McKenzie cautioned, unification is invariably another. Perceptions of difference are complemented by perceptions of similarity. Disintegration entails integration. The task of defining Shakespeare may be undertaken with clear consciences, confident that painstaking scholarship enlarges knowledge and that questions about ‘who wrote what’ really do matter. There is, therefore, something at stake in decisions about the limits of the Shakespeare canon.

This chapter considers the figure of the royal or noble ‘vagabond,’ theoretically entitled but actually dispossessed, a figure that in some Shakespeare plays becomes a conduit for questions about property relations and social organization. In 2 Henry VI, each side to the conflict over the throne construes itself as a ‘rightful owner’ and its opponent as a ‘pirate’ or ‘vagabond’; but the rightful owner is continually in danger of displacement into the ‘vagabond’ position, at which point he must become a pirate himself. The effect is to construe the pirate and the proprietor, the landowner and the vagrant, as both contraries and as replicas of one another. In the episodes of the Cade rebellion this effect is further intensified and developed, raising questions about the origins and social desirability of the institutions of private property. King Lear revisits some of the same issues, not merely to reprise the critique of property in the earlier play, but to suggest an even more radical conclusion. Indeed the effect of Lear’s wholesale, apocalyptic disjointings is to complicate, almost to the extent of annihilating, the powerful connections between property, power, and entitlement as they have been asserted in many of Shakespeare’s other plays.

This chapter focuses on 1 Henry VI. Some critics see it as the first part of a trilogy. Others have identified it as a sort of prequel, written after the success of the plays that have become known as 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI had rendered a return to the same subject a profitable prospect. Ultimately, 1 Henry VI reshuffles the pack of narrative tropes and ideological materials it inherited from parts II and III. It relocates the threat of female political agency outside England and organises it under the sign not merely of witchcraft but of popery. It similarly displaces the locus of ancient political virtue from civil to military affairs, and downgrades the role of the king. Still central is the topos of noble faction, but that faction is centred not on the succession but rather on the conduct of the war.

This chapter continues the discussion of The Merchant of Venice, focusing particularly on the vexed category of friendship, a less legally determinate form of relationship than the commercial contract or the bond between husband and wife. What friends may owe one other is a problem that comes up again and again in Shakespeare plays, and it becomes an especially urgent issue in The Merchant of Venice. The chapter contrasts the friendship between Bassanio and Antonio both with Antonio’s relation to Shylock, as manifested in the “pound of flesh” deal, and with Bassanio’s relation to Portia, as manifested in the ring trick. The ring trick might be considered a lesson in property management to a prodigal who is going to have to learn to contain his generosity in the interests of his marriage. This chapter considers the figure of the royal or noble “vagabond,” theoretically entitled but actually dispossessed, a figure that in some Shakespeare plays becomes a conduit for questions about property relations and social organization. In 2 Henry VI, each side to the conflict over the throne construes itself as a “rightful owner” and its opponent as a “pirate” or “vagabond”; but the rightful owner is continually in danger of displacement into the “vagabond” position, at which point he must become a pirate himself. The effect is to construe the pirate and the proprietor, the landowner and the vagrant, as both contraries and as replicas of one another. In the episodes of the Cade rebellion this effect is further intensified and developed, raising questions about the origins and social desirability of the institutions of private property. King Lear revisits some of the same issues, not merely to reprise the critique of property in the earlier play, but to suggest an even more radical conclusion. Indeed the effect of Lear’s wholesale, apocalyptic disjointings is to complicate, almost to the extent of annihilating, the powerful connections between property, power, and entitlement as they have been asserted in many of Shakespeare’s other plays.