grief,
Need friends. Subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?" (iii. 2).
But at other times, when his sense of majesty and his monarchical fanaticism master him, he speaks in a quite different tone:—
"Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.
For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd,
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel" (iii. 2).
Thus, too, at their first meeting (iii. 3) he addresses the victorious Henry of Hereford, to whom he immediately after "debases himself":—
"My master, God omnipotent.
Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence; and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn, and unbegot,
That lift your vassal hands against my head,
And threat the glory of my precious crown."
Many centuries after Richard, King Frederick William IV. of Prussia displayed just the same mingling of intellectuality, superstition, despondency, monarchical arrogance, and fondness for declamation.
In the fourth and fifth acts, the character of Richard and the poet's art rise to their highest point. The scene in which the groom, who alone has remained faithful to the fallen King, visits him in his dungeon, is one of penetrating beauty. What can be more touching than his description of how the "roan Barbary," which had been Richard's favourite horse, carried Henry of Lancaster on his entry into London, "so proudly as if he had disdained the ground." The Arab steed here symbolises with fine simplicity the attitude of all those who had sunned themselves in the prosperity of the now fallen King.
The scene of the abdication (iv. I) is admirable by reason of the delicacy of feeling and imagination which Richard displays. His speech when he and Henry have each one hand upon the crown is one of the most beautiful Shakespeare has ever written:—
"Now is this golden crown like a deep well,
That owes two buckets filling one another;
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen, and full of water:
That bucket down, and full of tears, am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high."
This scene is, however, a downright imitation of the abdication-scene in Marlowe. When Northumberland in Shakespeare addresses the dethroned King with the word "lord," the King answers, "No lord of thine." In Marlowe the speech is almost identical: "Call me not lord!"
The Shakespearian scene, it should be mentioned, has its history. The censorship under Elizabeth would not suffer it to be printed, and it first appears in the Fourth Quarto, of 1608.[1] The reason of this veto was that Elizabeth, strange as it may appear, was often compared with Richard II. The action of the censorship renders it probable that it was Shakespeare's Richard II. (and not one of the earlier plays on the same theme) which, as appears in the trial of Essex, was acted by the Lord Chamberlain's Company before the conspirators, at their leaders' command, on the evening before the outbreak of the rebellion (February 7, 1601). There is nothing inconsistent with this theory in the fact that the players then called it an old play, which was already "out of use;" for the interval between 1593-94 and 1601 was sufficient, according to the ideas of that time, to render a play antiquated. Nor does it conflict with this view that in the last scenes of the play the King is sympathetically treated. On the very points on which he was comparable with Elizabeth there could be no doubt that he was in the wrong; while Henry of Hereford figures in the end as the bearer of England's future, and, for the not over-sensitive nerves of the period, that was sufficient. He, who was soon to play a leading part in two other Shakespearian dramas, is here endowed with all the qualities of the successful usurper and ruler: cunning and insight, power of dissimulation, ingratiating manners, and promptitude in action.
In a single speech (v. 3) the new-made Henry IV. sketches the character of his "unthrifty son," Shakespeare's hero: he passes his time in the taverns of London with riotous boon-companions, who now and then even rob travellers on the highway; but, being no less daring than dissolute, he gives certain "sparks of hope" for a nobler future.
[1] Its title runs, "The Tragedie of King Richard the Second: with new additions of the Parliament Sceane, and the deposing of King Richard, As it hath been lately acted by the Kinges Maiesties Seruantes, at the Globe. By William Shake-speare. At London. Printed by W. W. For Mathew Law, and are to be sold at his shop in Paules Church-yard, at the Signe of the Foxe. 1608."
XVIII
RICHARD III. PSYCHOLOGY AND MONOLOGUES—SHAKESPEARE'S POWER OF SELF-TRANSFORMATION—CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN—THE PRINCIPAL SCENES—THE CLASSIC TENDENCY OF THE TRAGEDY
IN the year 1594-95 Shakespeare returns to the material which passed through his hands during his revision of the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI. He once more takes up the character of Richard of York, there so firmly outlined; and, as in Richard II. he had followed in Marlowe's footsteps, so he now sets to work with all his might upon a Marlowesque figure, but only to execute it with his own vigour, and around it to construct his first historic tragedy with well-knit dramatic action. The earlier "histories" were still half epical; this is a true drama. It quickly became one of the most effective and popular pieces on the stage, and has imprinted itself on the memory of all the world in virtue of the monumental character of its protagonist.
The immediate occasion of Shakespeare's taking up this theme was probably the fact that in the year 1594 an old and worthless play on the subject was published under the title of The True Tragedy of Richard III. The publication of this play may have been clue to the renewed interest in its hero awakened by the performances of Henry VI.
It is impossible to assign a precise date to Shakespeare's play. The first Quarto of Richard II. was entered in the Stationers' Register oh the 29th August 1597, and the first edition of Richard III. was entered on the 20th October of the same year. But there is no doubt that its earliest form is of much older date. The diversities in its style indicate that Shakespeare worked over the text even before it was first printed; and the difference between the text of the first Quarto and that of the first Folio bears witness to a radical revision having taken place in the interval between the two editions. It is certainly to this play that John Weever alludes when, in his poem, Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare, written as early as 1595, he mentions Richard among the poet's creations.
From the old play of Richard III. Shakespeare took nothing at all, or, to be precise, possibly one or two lines in the first scene of the second act. He throughout followed Holinshed, whose Chronicle is here copied word for word from Hall, who, in his turn, merely translated Sir Thomas More's history of Richard III. We can even tell what edition of Holinshed Shakespeare used, for he has copied a slip of the pen or error of the press which appears in that edition alone. In Act v. scene 3, line 324, he writes:—
"Long kept in Bretagne at our mother's cost,"
instead of brother's.
The text of Richard III. presents no slight difficulties to the editors of Shakespeare. Neither the first Quarto nor the greatly amended Folio is free from gross and baffling errors. The editors of the Cambridge Edition have attempted to show that both the texts are taken from bad copies of the original manuscripts. It would not surprise us, indeed, that the poet's own manuscript, being perpetually handled by the prompter and stage-manager,