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The slaughter of Rutland by the Lancastrian Clifford was to find its parallel in the stabbing of Edward by the three brothers of York; the butchery of York, amidst the taunts and execrations of Margaret and her followers, was to be equalled by the sudden murder of the desolate Henry in his prison-house. There was to be no retribution for these later crimes. The justice which had so long presided over this eventful story was now to sleep. If there was vengeance in reserve, it was to be distant and shadowy. The scene was to close with "stately triumphs;" "drums and trumpets" were to sound; Hope was to display to the conqueror her visions of "lasting joy." If the poet had here closed his chronicle, he would have been an imperfect interpreter of his own idea. We open another leaf of the same volume, and all becomes clear and consistent.

To understand the character of the Richard III. of Shakspere, we must have traced its development by the author of 'The Contention.' We have already pointed out in Section II. how thoroughly the character was a creation of the early author; and how entire the unity was preserved between the last of these four dramas, which everybody admits to be the work of the "greatest name in all literature," in an unbroken link with the previous drama, which everybody has been in the habit of assigning to some obscure and very inferior writer. We are taught to open "The Life and Death of King Richard III.,' and to look upon the extraordinary being who utters the opening lines as some new creation, set before us in the perfect completeness of self-formed villainy. We have not learnt to trace the growth of the mind of this bold bad man; to see how his bravery became gradually darkened with ferocity; how his prodigious talents insensibly allied themselves with cunning and hypocrisy; how, in struggling for his house, he ultimately proposed to struggle for himself; how, in fact, the bad ambition would be naturally kindled in his mind, to seize upon the power which was sliding from the hands of the voluptuous Edward, and the "simple, plain Clarence." He that wrote

"I have no brothers, I am like no brother;

And this word love, which greybeards term divine,

Be resident in men like one another,

And not in me; I am myself alone "

prepared the way for the Richard that was to tell us—

"If I fail not in my deep intent,

Clarence hath not another day to live:

Which done, God take king Edward to his mercy,

And leave the world for me to bustle in!"

The poet of the 'Richard III.' goes straightforward to his object; for he has made all the preparation in the previous dramas. No gradual development is wanting of the character which is now to sway the action. The struggle of the houses up to this point has been one only of violence; and it was therefore anarchical. "The big-boned" Warwick, and the fiery Clifford, alternately presided over the confusion. The power which changed the

"Dreadful marches to delightful measures

seemed little more than accident. But Richard proposed to himself to subject events to his domination, not by courage alone, or activity, or even by the legitimate exercise of a commanding intellect, but by the clearest and coolest perception of the strength which he must inevitably possess who unites the deepest sagacity to the most thorough unscrupulousness in its exercise, and is an equal master of the weapons of force and of craft. The character of Richard is essentially different from any other character which Shakspere has drawn. His bloody violence is not that of Macbeth; nor his subtle treachery that of Iago. It is difficult to say whether he derives a greater satisfaction from the success of his crimes, or from the consciousness of power which attends the working of them. This is a feature which he holds in common with Iago. But then he does not labour with a “ motiveless malignity," as Iago does. He has no vague suspicions, no petty jealousies, no remembrance of slight affronts, to stimulate him to a disproportioned and unnatural vengeance. He does not hate his victims; but they stand in his way, and, as he does not love them, they perish. He chuckles in the fortitude which this alienation from humanity confers upon him :

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Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee so,

That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven,

If Heaven will take the present at our hand."

Other men, the most obdurate, have been wrought upon by a mother's tears and a mother's prayers: they are to him a jest :

"Madam, my mother, I do cry you mercy,

I did not see your grace:-Humbly on my knee

I crave your blessing.

Duch. God bless thee, and put meekness in thy breast,

Love, charity, obedience, and true duty.

Glo. Amen; and make me die a good old man!

That is the butt-end of a mother's blessing;

I marvel that her grace did leave it out."

Villains of the blackest die disguise their crimes even from them

selves. Richard shrinks not from their avowal to others, for a purpose. The wooing of Lady Anne is, perhaps, the boldest thing in the Shaksperean drama. It is perpetually on the verge of the impossible; yet the marvellous consistency of character with which it is conducted renders the whole of this conduct probable, if we once get over the difficulty which startles Richard himself:

"Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?

Was ever woman in this humour wou?"

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His exultation at having accomplished his purpose by the sole agency of "the plain devil and dissembling looks" is founded on his unbounded reliance upon his mental powers; and that reliance is even strong enough to afford that he should abate so much of his self-love as to be joyous in the contemplation of his own bodily deformity.

It is the result of the peculiar organization of Richard's mind, formed as it had been by circumstances as well as by nature, that he invariably puts himself in the attitude of one who is playing a part. It is this circumstance which makes the character (clumsy even as it has been made by the joinery of Cibber) such a favourite on the stage. It cannot be over-acted. It was not without a purpose that the author of The Contention' put in the mouth of Henry "What scene of death hath Roscius now to act?"

Burbage, the original player of Richard, according to Bishop Corbet's description of his host at Bosworth,* was identified with him. This aptitude for subjecting all his real thoughts and all his natural impulses to the exigences of the scene of life in which he was to

"Mine host was full of ale and history,

And in the morning when he brought us nigh
Where the two Roses join'd, you would suppose
Chaucer ne'er made the romaunt of the Rose.

Hear him. See you yon wood? There Richard lay
With his whole army. Look the other way,
And lo! while Richmond in a bed of gorse
Encamp'd himself all night, and all his force,
Upon this hill they met. Why, he could tell
The inch where Richmond stood, where Richard fell.
Besides what of his knowledge he could say,

He had authentic notice from the play;
Which I might guess by marking up the ghosts,

And policies not incident to hosts;

But chiefly by that one perspicuous thing
Where he mistook a player for a king.

For when he would have said, King Richard died,
And call'd, A horse! a horse! he Burbage cried."

play the chief part, equally govern his conduct whether he is wooing Lady Anne-or denouncing the relations of the queen-or protesting before the king,

""T is death to me to be at enmity"

or mentioning the death of Clarence as a thing of course—or begging the strawberries from the Bishop of Ely when he is meditating the execution of Hastings-or appearing on the Tower walls in rusty armour—or rejecting the crown which the citizens present to him or dismissing Buckingham with

"Thou troublest me, I am not in the vein

or soliciting the mother of his murdered nephews to win for him her daughter,

"As I intend to prosper and repent."

It is only in the actual presence of a powerful enemy that Richard displays any portion of his natural character. His bravery required no dissimulation to uphold it. In his last battle-field he puts forth all the resources of his intellect in a worthy direction: but the retribution is fast approaching. It was not enough for offended justice that he should die as a hero: the terrible tortures of conscience were to precede the catastrophe. The drama has exhibited all it could exhibit-the palpable images of terror haunting a mind already anticipating the end. "Radcliff, I fear, I fear,” is the first revelation of the true inward man to a fellow-being. But the terror is but momentary :

"Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls."

To the last the poet exhibits the supremacy of Richard's intellect, his ready talent, and his unwearied energy. The tame address of Richmond to his soldiers, and the spirited exhortation of Richard, could not have been the result of accident.

It appears to us, then, that the complete development of the character of Richard was absolutely essential to the completion of the great idea upon which the poet constructed these four dramas. There was a man to be raised up out of the wild turbulence of the long contest-not cruel, after the mere fashion of a Clifford's cruelty-not revengeful, according to the passionate impulses of the revenge of a Margaret and of an Edward—not false and perjured, in imitation of the irresolute weakness of a Clarence-but one who was cruel, and revengeful, and treacherous, upon the deepest premeditation and with the most profound hypocrisy. That man was also to be so confident in his intellectual power, that no

resolve was too daring to be acted upon, no risk too great to be encountered. Fraud and force were to go hand in hand, and the one was to exterminate what the other could not win. This man was to be an instrument of that justice which was to preside to the end of this "sad eventful history." By his agency was the house of York to fall, as the house of Lancaster had fallen. The innocent by him were to be swept away with the guilty. Last of all, the Fate was to be appeased-the one great criminal was to perish out of the consequences of his own enormities.

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It is an observation of Horace Walpole that Shakspere, in his Richard III.,' seems to deduce the woes of the house of York from the curses which Queen Margaret had vented against them." It was the faith of Margaret that curses were all-powerful :

"I'll not believe but they ascend the sky,
And there awake God's gentle-sleeping peace.'

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This was the poetical faith of the author of these dramas-the power of the curse was associated with the great idea of a presiding Fate. But Margaret's were not the only curses. Richard himself, in one passage, where he appears to make words exhibit thoughts and not conceal them, refers to the same power of a curse-that of his father, insulted in his death-hour by the scorns of Margaret, and moved to tears by her atrocious cruelty. This is the assertion of the equal justice which is displayed in the dramatic issue of these fearful events; not justice upon the house of York alone, which Horace Walpole thinks Shakspere strove to exhibit in deference to Tudor prejudices, but justice upon the house of Lancaster as well as the house of York, for those individual crimes of the leaders of each house that had made a charnel-ground of England. When that justice had asserted its supremacy tranquillity was to come. The poet has not chosen to exhibit the establishment of law and order in the astute government of Henry VII.; but in his drama of 'Henry VIII.' he has carried us onward to a new state of things, when the power of the sword was at an end. He came as near to his own times as was either safe or fitting; but he contrasts his own times with the days of civil fury, in a prophetic view of the reign of Elizabeth :

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"In her days, every man shall eat in safety,

Under his own vine, what he plants; and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours."†

* Richard III., Act I., Scene 3.
Henry VIII., Act V., Scene 4.

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