The problems connected with the authorship of Henry the Eighth are in some ways different from those usual in the doubtful plays. In the first place, the external evidence is singularly exact and definite and in no way contradictory. That a play dealing with the reign of Henry the Eighth and bearing either the title or the sub-title All Is True was being acted June 29, 1613 at the Globe Theatre is attested by at least three contemporary documents which tell of the fire which destroyed the theatre that day. The publication of the play in the Folio of 1623 is, however, the only direct attribution to Shakespeare. According to one of the ballads written about the Globe fire, Heminge and Condell, the Folio editors, were both present at the time of the fire; their later inclusion of the play in the Folio must, therefore, have been with full knowledge of its authorship. In the second place, the play is so evidently by two hands that, even as early as 1758, Roderick pointed out peculiarities of metre which did not seem to him Shakespearean. A chance remark of Tennyson's that ‘many passages in Henry the Eighth were very much in the manner of Fletcher,’ combined with his own impressions, led Spedding to investigate the matter more fully, with the result that in 1850 he published his paper, ‘Who wrote Shakespeare's Henry the Eighth?’ As a result of this investigation and of the application of metrical tests, in the results of which his investigations were substantiated by those of Fleay, Furnivall and others, he concluded that more than one half of the play had been written by Fletcher, and pronounced as Shakespearean only the following scenes: Act I, Scenes 1 and 2; Act II, Scenes 3 and 4; Act III Scene 2 (to the exit of the king); Act V Scene 1—with alterations. With this decision, so far as the work of Fletcher is concerned, practically all later critics have been in agreement. The problem, then, has long been one not of the sole authorship of Shakespeare, but of his part in the play.