A theatrical quarrel of more serious consequence took place six months later, in the spring of 1591, when Edward Alleyn was engaged in a dispute with James Burbage. The precise cause and nature of their controversy are not known, but no doubt it had something to do with money. Burbage may have been treating his actors in the same high-handed manner which he had shown to the widow Brayne. The consequence was that Alleyn decamped to the Rose, the theatre on the other side of the Thames that was owned and managed by Philip Henslowe. He also took with him a large part of the combined Admiral’s and Strange’s company of players as well as certain play-books and costumes. Richard Burbage of course stayed in the northern suburbs, in the theatres owned by his father, together with a group of players who had not wished to set up with Alleyn in a new playhouse. Among those who stayed with Burbage were John Sincler, known as Sinklo, Henry Condell, Nicholas Tooley, and Christopher Beeston. All of them, with the exception of Tooley, would also work with Shakespeare for the rest of his life. It is interesting that, in his revision of King John, Shakespeare gives Richard Burbage the most heroic part in the play. From the evidence of the surviving playbooks, too, it can be assumed that he was one of those who decided to stay with the Burbages and the others at the Theatre. They were eventually granted the patronage of the Earl of Pembroke, and became known as Pembroke’s Men.
Shakespeare no doubt decided to remain with Burbage and his men because he would then be the principal writer of the company. It was gratifying to have a company at hand to give expression to his vision of the world. As resident playwright he seems also to have brought some of his plays with him, as if he exercised a proprietorial right over them. This was unusual, since the plays generally belonged to the companies or to the managers of the playhouses, but it suggests that even at this early stage he was not lacking a certain business acumen or professional expertise. That is how Burbage’s players were able to perform Titus Andronicus and The Taming of a Shrew.
They also performed two other plays, The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, which anticipate the second and third parts of Henry VI. They may in fact have been written before the separation between Alleyn and Burbage. Another form of contention now surrounds these two early dramas, predictably between those who believe that they were written and subsequently revised by the young Shakespeare, those who argue that they were composed by one or two unknown and unnamed dramatists, and those who insist that they are later reconstructions. The first supposition seems the most likely. Both plays were published by reputable stationers, and a later combined edition of 1619 is declared to be “Written by William Shakespeare, Gent.” The First Part of the Contention anticipates the second part of Henry VI in almost every respect, from whole scenes to individual lines and the smallest phrases. The True Tragedy bears an equally strong resemblance to the third part of the historical trilogy. The order of the scenes is the same; the long speeches are the same; the dialogue is the same. There can scarcely be any doubt that they are the originals of, and models for, the later and more accomplished plays.
There are certain scholars, however, who suggest that The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy actually came later and were in effect “memorial reconstructions” of Shakespeare’s own plays. By “memorial reconstruction” is meant the theory that a group of actors, who had played in both parts of Henry VI, came together and tried to recall the words and scenes of the plays so that they might act or publish them for their own purposes. They remembered what they could, and invented the rest. The texts themselves do not bear out this interesting hypothesis. Many of the longer speeches are remembered word for word while other shorter scenes and passages are not remembered at all. It is odd that, despite their lapses of memory, they were able to produce coherent plays that manifest integrity of plot, language and imagery. Which inspired actor, for example, produced the line “Et tu Brute, wilt thou stab Caesar too?” He could not have been “reconstructing” Julius Caesar because it had not yet been written.
The simple response, to textual evidence such as this, is to agree that the young Shakespeare wrote these early plays and then over the course of time revised them for performance. The overwhelming similarity between The Contention and The True Tragedy and the second and third parts of Henry VI rests on the fact that they were all written by the same person with the same skills and preoccupations. There is no evidence for any theatrical conspiracy, and it is hard to imagine an occasion when it would be deemed necessary. Who were these actors who patched up plays already known to be composed by Shakespeare? To what company did they belong? And why was no action taken to prevent their publishing their speculative and illicit ventures? It is scarcely likely that, in 1619, Shakespeare’s name would be attached to the re-publication of their fraudulent endeavours. The theory defies common logic.
It is significant, too, that these plays represent further ventures into the genre of the history play that he had already fashioned in The Troublesome Raigne of King John and Edmund Ironside. He returned to the chronicles for much of his information, and again produced an historical spectacle complete with processions and battles. He knew that he excelled in this kind of work, and he knew also that it was extraordinarily popular.
All of the formidable qualities of the second and third parts of Henry VI are to be found in The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy. There is in all of them a truly epic breadth of scale with wars and rebellions, battles on the field and confrontations in the presence chamber; there is the poetry of power and of pathos, as well as the more martial clangour of duel and dispute; there are fights at sea and on land; there are murders and a plentiful supply of severed heads; there are death-beds and scenes of black magic; there is comedy and melodrama, farce and tragedy. Shakespeare invents passages of history when it suits his dramatic purpose. He revises, excises and enlarges historical episodes in the same spirit. It is clear that the young dramatist was revelling in his ability to invent paradigmatic action and to orchestrate great scenes of battle or procession. From the beginning he had a fluent and fertile dramatic imagination, charged with ritual and spectacle. The public stage was not then fixed; it was fast and fluid, capable of accommodating a wide range of effects. There was no dramatic theory about historical drama; playwrights learned from each other, and plays copied other plays. Shakespeare was still imitating Marlowe and Greene at this early date in his career, to such an extent that one or two scholars have ascribed these plays to them. This is most unlikely. The best analogy at this later date is with the historical films of Sergei Eisenstein, in particular the two parts of Ivan the Terrible where grave ritual and grotesque farce are held together in a context of overwhelming majesty. We may imagine the Shakespearian actors to have been as stylised, in action and in delivery, as the performers of the early Russian cinema. The plays represented a ritualised and emblematic society where matters of heraldry and genealogy were of immense importance. They themselves are a form of ritual, like a religious ceremony assisted by chanting and incantation.