nothing moral), the necessity of deploying before himself and others the terrible resources of his will. One human tie Shakspere attributes to Richard; contemptuous to his mother, indifferent to the life or death of Clarence and Edward, except as their life or death may serve his own attempt upon the crown, cynically loveless towards his feeble and unhappy wife, Richard admires with an enthusiastic admiration his great father:

"Methinks 't is prize enough to be his son."

And the memory of his father supplies him with a family pride which, however, does not imply attachment or loyalty to any member of his house.

"but I was born so high;

Our aery buildeth in the cedar's top,

And dallies with the wind and scorns the sun."

History supplied Shakspere with the figure of his Richard. He has been accused of darkening the colours, and exaggerating the deformity of the character of the historical Richard found in More and Holinshed. The fact is precisely the contrary. The mythic Richard of the historians (and there must have been some appalling fact to originate such a myth) is made somewhat less grim and bloody by the dramatist.* Essentially, however, Shakspere's Richard is of the diabolical (something more dreadful than the criminal) class. He is not weak, because he is single-hearted in his devotion to evil. Richard does not serve two masters. He is not like John, a dastardly criminal; he is not like Macbeth, joyless and faithless because he has deserted loyalty and honour. He has a fierce joy, and he is an intense believer—in the

* See the detailed study of this play by W. Oechelhäuser in Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, vol. iii. pp. 37–39, and pp. 47, 53. Holinshed's treatment of the character of Richard is hardly in harmony with itself. From the death of Edward IV. onwards the Richard of Holinshed resembles Shakspere's Richard, but possesses fainter traces of humanity.

creed of hell. And therefore he is strong. He inverts the moral order of things, and tries to live in this inverted system. He does not succeed; he dashes himself to pieces against the laws of the world which he has outraged. Yet, while John is wholly despicable, we cannot refrain from yielding a certain tribute of admiration to the bolder malefactor, who ventures on the daring experiment of choosing evil for his good.

Such an experiment, Shakspere declares emphatically, as experience and history declare, must in the end fail. The ghosts of the usurper's victims rise between the camps, and are to Richard the Erinnyes, to Richmond inspirers of hope and victorious courage. At length Richard trembles on the brink of annihilation, trembles over the loveless gulf:

"I shall despair; there is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul shall pity me."

But the stir of battle restores him to resolute thoughts: "Come, bustle, bustle, caparison my horse," and he dies in a fierce paroxysm of action. Richmond conquers, and he conquers expressly as the champion and representative of the moral order of the world, which Richard had endeavoured to set aside :

"O Thou, whose captain I account myself,
Look on my forces with a gracious eye;

Put in their hands thy bruising irons of wrath,
That they may crush down with a heavy fall
The usurping helmets of our adversaries!
Make us thy ministers of chastisement,
That we may praise thee in thy victory."

The figure of Queen Margaret is painfully persistent upon the mind's eye, and tyrannizes, almost as much as the figure of King Richard himself, over the imagination. "Although banished upon pain of death, she returns to England to assist at the intestine conflicts of the House of York. Shakspere personifies in her the ancient Nemesis; he gives her

more than human proportions, and represents her as a sort of supernatural apparition. She penetrates freely into the palace of Edward IV., she there breathes forth her hatred in presence of the family of York and its courtier attendants. No one dreams of arresting her, although she is an exiled woman, and she goes forth, meeting no obstacle, as she had entered. The same magic ring, which on the first occasion opened the doors of the royal mansion, opens them for her once again, when Edward IV. is dead, and his sons have been assassinated in the Tower by the order of Richard. She came, the first time, to curse her enemies; she comes now to gather the fruits of her malediction. Like an avenging Fury, or the classical Fate, she has announced to each his doom."*

[From Mr. F. J. Furnivall's Introduction to the Play.†]

Richard the Third is written on the model of Shakspere's great rival, Christopher Marlowe, the Canterbury cobbler's son, who was stabbed in a tavern brawl on June 1, 1593. It was Marlowe's characteristic to embody in a character, and realize with terrific force, the workings of a single passion. In Tamburlaine he personified the lust of dominion, in Faustus the lust of forbidden power and knowledge, in Barabas (The Few of Malta) the lust of wealth and blood (J. A. Symonds). In Richard III. Shakspere embodied ambition, and sacrificed his whole play to this one figure. Gloster's first declaration of his motives shows, of course, the young dramatist, as the want of relief in the play, and the monotony of its curses, also do. But Richard's hypocrisies, his exultation in them, his despising and insulting his victims, his grim humour and delight in gulling fools, and in his own villainy, are admirably brought out, and that no less than thirteen times in the play. 1. With Clarence. 2. With Hast

*A. Mézières, Shakespeare, ses (Euvres et ses Critiques, p. 139.
The Leopold Shakspere (London, 1877), p. xxxix.

ings. 3. With Anne, widow of Prince Edward, Henry the Sixth's son, whom Richard the Third, when Gloster, had stabbed. 4. With Queen Elizabeth, with Rivers and Hastings, and possibly in his professed repentance for the wrongs he did Queen Margaret in murdering her son and husband.* 5. With Edward the Fourth on his death-bed, and his queen, and lords, and as to the author of Clarence's death. 6. With his nephew, Clarence's son. 7. With Queen Elizabeth and his mother, "Amen! And make me die a good old man!" 8. With Buckingham, “I as a child will go by thy direction." 9. With the young prince, Edward the Fifth, "God keep you from them and from such false friends." 10. With Hastings and the Bishop of Ely. 11. With the Mayor about Hastings and then about taking the crown — (note 'Richard's utter brutality and baseness in his insinuation of his mother's adultery). 12. With Buckingham about the murder of the princes. 13. With Queen Elizabeth when he repeats the scene of his wooing with Anne, as the challenge-scene is repeated in Richard II. Villain as he is, he has the villain's coolness too. He never loses temper, except when he strikes the third messenger. As a general he is as skilful as Henry the Fifth, and looks to his sentinels; while, like Henry the Fourth, he is up and doing at the first notice of danger, and takes the right practical measures. Yet the conscience he

ridicules, he is made to feel—

"there is no creature loves me;

And if I die, no soul shall pity me."

But we must note that this is only when his will is but half awake, half paralyzed by its weight of sleep. As soon as the man is himself again, neither conscience nor care for love or pity troubles him. The weakest part of the play is the scene of the citizens' talk; and the poorness of it, and the monotony of the women's curses, have given rise to the theory that * I have always, though, considered this genuine repentance, or at least a genuine profession of it.

in Richard III. Shakspere was only re-writing an old play, of which he let bits stand. But though I once thought this possible, I have since become certain that it is not so. The wooing of Anne by Richard has stirred me, in reading it aloud, almost as much as any thing else in Shakspere. Note, too, how the first lines of the play lift you out of the mist and confusion of the Henry VI. plays into the sun of Shakspere's genius.