Dennis McCarthy on Substack

Here is another example (part 2 of my response), confirming that the Prince Harry trilogy was completed by the early 1580s [This is from an unpublished work -- and it follows a great number of well known allusions by Thomas Nashe to the King Harry plays--1, 2 Henry IV and Henry V ...] "Have with you' has numerous other references to 1 and 2 Henry IV. The most obvious occurs in an attack on Harvey in which Nashe is ridiculing the different kinds of verse with which he was most familiar when he was a younger man—and that includes the blank verse version of the King Harry plays: “Indeed, in old King Harry sincerity, a kind of verse it is, he [Harvey] hath been enfeoffed in from his minority, for as I have been faithfully informed he first cried in that verse in the very moment of his birth, and when he was but yet a freshman in Cambridge, he set up Si quisses & sent his accounts to his father in those jolting heroics.” (4). As Penny McCarthy argues, this is a reference to the plays on Henry IV and Henry V. Nashe not only makes other allusions to these plays in the work; he also forces the rare word enfeoffed into an obvious rhyming echo. “Enfeoffed in from his minority” is a takeoff on Henry IV’s line to and about his young son, “Enfeoff’d himself to popularity” (1 Henry IV 3.2.69). Both lines refer to young, impressionable men being too influenced by their disreputable surroundings. The play also uses “Harry” as the nickname for the young king, and scholars to this day use the same moniker for the subject of these canonical history plays. Phyllis N. Braxton’s exploration of the relationship between Prince Hal and Falstaff, for example, is titled “Such A King Harry,” itself taken from Michael Drayton’s Henry V-inspired poem, The Battle of Agincourt (1606), the last lines of which ask “O when Shall … England breed again / Such a King Harry?” Importantly, Nashe is explicitly describing King Harry as a work of verse—indeed, one that had been adapted by someone else. Nashe also uses the word "sincerity" in its now obsolete sense to refer to a genuine, original, and authorial text. The OED records this literary definition: “Genuineness (of a passage). Obs.” and offers the following example: “Though this [passage] … be nowhere now to be found in those extant Tragedies of this Poet … yet the sincerity thereof, cannot reasonably be at all suspected by us.” This is the only possible meaning in Nashe’s comment: “old King Harry sincerity …” means “the old King Harry, the original,” the first, authorial, genuine play on King Harry, as distinguished from its more recent adaptation (i.e., The Famous Victories of Henry V). In the Prologue to Cynthia’s Revels, Nashe’s friend and co-satirist, Ben Jonson, makes the same distinction between the original and more recent adaptation of Jeronimo, mocking the self-styled theatre critic who “swears … that the old Hieronomo (as it was first acted) was the only best and judiciously-penned Play of Europe.” Old and as it was first acted distinguishes the original 1580s version of the play from its more recent staged adaptation. As with “old Hieronomo,” “old King Harry” can only refer to the old version of the play, not the actual person, as King Harry himself was never remotely old. Throughout the trilogy, he is portrayed as a rambunctious young prince and youthful and vibrant king—and he died at age 35. Again, it is the old play that Nashe is referring to and paraphrasing. Regardless, Nashe’s description of its being a kind of verse, coupled with his pointed spoof of North’s phrase enfeoffed himself to popularity in an admonition to a young man succumbing to peer pressure, as well as the allusions to Hotspurs and Buckram Giants, the puns on Oldcastle and his size, and the many other parallel passages recorded by Dover Wilson, McCarthy, Tobin, and others, prove that the original, verse plays about Henry IV and Henry V did include these parodied lines, phrases, descriptions, and scenes—and had been completed when Harvey was still a young man (e.g., by early 1580s). The original was much like the one we know today. As indicated in Chapter 9, in 1579 Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey discussed A Jew of Venice. Here, Nashe was also underscoring Harvey’s early familiarity with North’s history plays, contending that, as a young man, Harvey, inspired by North’s blank verse plays, attempted such “jolting heroics.” And even this description recalls Nashe’s and Harvey’s other North- and Shakespeare-related comments about the swelling, bragging, brave, and puissant style of verse. In the preface to Greene’s Menaphon, Nashe refers to the Italianate translator’s plays as filled with the “swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse.” Likewise, in Groatsworth, Nashe complains to the three gentleman scholars that Shake-scene “supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you” (21). In A New Praise of the Old Ass, Harvey describes the title-character’s works of “doughtiest puissance or worthiest valour” (67). All these descriptions are synonymous with verse in “jolting heroics.” In summary, we know that the latter histories on the Prince Hal trilogy were penned by the early 1590s (indeed early 1580s) because of the many allusions to them in the Nashe-Harvey pamphlet wars. We know that Nashe was following the dramatist and not the other way around because (a) the allusions appear as puns and forced jokes in Nashean satires that also spoof other literary works, while in the canon they are authentically historical elements derived from Hall and Holinshed; (b) Nashe refers to the original King Harry plays as a work of verse in “jolting heroics”; (c) Nashe spoofs a line in the play enfeoffed himself to popularity, confirming that was part of the original work; (d) Harvey quotes some of Nashe’s allusions and accuses him of using them in reference to another writer; (e) Nashe even admits that his quotations about 1 and 2 Henry IV and Midas have literary precedence in “foreign writers,” a frequent jab at North and Lyly. Indeed, Nashe even contends that Harvey was aware of these plays when a young man. All this confirms what we earlier learned from Philip Sidney’s references to 1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V, along with the Henry VI plays, Pericles, and Coriolanus, in his Defense of Poesy (1582), and from the Chorus in Henry V, which alludes to and rebuts Sidney’s attacks and refers to an Irish rebellion that can only be the Captain MacMorris rebellion. All this fits seamlessly into the life of North, who penned the “jolting heroics” of the King Harry plays in 1581-82 when he was a captain of troops trying to quash the Captain MacMorris rebellion in Ireland (1579-83).