Lot Description from the Auction Catalogue

From Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human]:
"...Something of the likely inadequacy of that inaugural Hamlet can be deduced from a consideration of what we now call (following the First Folio) The First part of King Henry the Siixth. Written in 1589-90 ( and then evidently revised in 1594-95), Shakespeare's play is bad enough that perhaps we should not lament the loss of the first Hamlet, which I suspect would have been at least as crude. Attempts by critics to ascribe much of Henry VI, Part One, to Robert Greene or George Peele, very minor dramatists, do not persuade me, though I would be pleased to believe that other botchers had been at work in addition to the very young Shakespeare. What I hear, though, is Marlowe's mode and rhetoric appropriated with great zest and courage but with little independence, as though the novice dramatist were wholly intoxicated by the Tamburlaine plays and The Jew of Malta. The laments for Henry V, whose funeral begins the play, sound rather like the dirges for Tamburlaine the Great...p43"

From Edinburgh Library listing on COPAC:
The 2 parts first appeared separately and anonymously in 1594 and 1595 under titles: The first part of the contention betwixt the two famous houses of Yorke and Lancaster ; and, The true tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt. They form the basis of Shakespeare's Henry VI, parts 2 and 3. The authorship of this play and its relation to Shakespeare's version are much disputed--cf. NUC pre-1956.