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. 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. NOTE BY THE EDITOR.-Mr. James Russell Lowell, in a lecture at Chicago, February 22, 1887, expressed the opinion that the play was merely revised by Shakespeare. "It appears to me," he said, "that an examination of Richard III. plainly indicates that it is a play which Shakespeare adapted to the stage, making additions, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter; and toward the end he either grew weary of his work or was pressed for time, and left the older author, whoever he was, pretty much to himself." This does not differ essentially from the decision to which Mr. F. G. Fleay has come in his Chronicle History of Shakespeare, published in 1886 (p. 276): "Richard III. has always been regarded as entirely Shakespeare's, and its likeness to 3 Henry VI. has more than anything else kept alive the untenable belief that this last-named play was also, in part or wholly, written by our greatest dramatist. Yet the unlikeness of Richard III. to the other historical plays of Shakespeare, and the impracticability of finding a definite position for it, metrically or æsthetically, in any chronological arrangement, have made themselves felt. . . . There can be little doubt that in this, as in John, Shakespeare derived his plot and part of his text from an anterior play, the difference in the two cases being that in Richard III. he adopted much more of his predecessor's text. I believe that the anterior play was Marlowe's, partly written for Lord Strange's company in 1593, but left unfinished at Marlowe's death, and completed and altered by Shakespeare in 1594.. The unhistorical but grandly classical conception of Margaret, the Cassandra prophetess, the Helen-Ate of the House of Lancaster, which binds the whole tetralogy [the three parts of Henry VI. and Richard III.] into one work, is evidently due to Marlowe, and the consummate skill with which he has fused the heterogeneous contributions of his coadjutors in the two earlier Henry VI. plays is no less worthy of admiration. I do not think it possible to separate Marlowe's work from Shakespeare's in this play-it is worked in with too cunning a hand.... Could any critic, if the elder John were destroyed, tell us which lines had been adopted in the later play?" It may be noted incidentally that what Mr. Lowell says of the marks of less careful revision of the earlier work toward the end of Richard III. is curiously in accordance with Mr. Fleay's theory of the make-up of C ... } that portion of the folio text, as given in Dr. Ingleby's Shakespeare: The Man and the Book, Part II. p. 139. He says there that the folio text up to a certain point in the third scene of act v. "gives the acting version in use in 1622;" but from that point to the end "it is supplemented from the 1602 quarto," the prompter's copy from which the rest was printed being probably "deficient towards the conclusion." Even so cautious and conservative a critic as Halliwell - Phillipps recognizes indications of earlier work in the play. In his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (6th ed. vol. i. p. 136-where, however, the passage is reprinted without change from the earlier editions), after referring to the historical sources of the plot in More and Holinshed, he adds: "There are also slight traces of an older play to be observed, passages which may belong to an inferior hand, and incidents, such as that of the rising of the ghosts,* suggested probably by similar ones in a more ancient composition. That the play of Richard III., as we now have it, is essentially Shakespeare's, cannot admit of a doubt; but as little can it be questioned that to the circumstance of an anterior work on the subject having been used do we owe some of its weakness and excessively turbulent character. No copy of this older play is known to exist, but one brief speech and the two following lines have been accidentally preserved: 'My liege, the Duke of Buckingham is ta'en, [compare Richard III. iv. 4. 529: 'My liege, the Duke of Buckingham is taken'], from which it is clear that the new dramatist did not hesitate to adopt an occasional line from his predecessor, although he entirely omitted the character of Banister. Both plays must have been successful, for, notwithstanding the great popularity of Shakespeare's, the more ancient one sustained its ground on the English stage until the reign of Charles I." As we have said above (p. 11), the date of the play is probably as early as 1594, if not 1593. Its peculiarities and imperfections may be partially due to a mingling of earlier work by another hand, but we are inclined to agree with Halliwell-Phillipps that it is "essentially Shakespeare's." *Mr. Lowell remarked that the procession of ghosts in the play always struck him "as ludicrous and odd rather than impressive." Gloster. Now is the winter of our discontent Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths, 22 Got my ไม่ |