deeper shade of ambiguity crosses the fine character of Mowbray. Bolingbroke charges him with direct complicity in Gloucester's murder. He replies evasively : For Gloucester . I slew him not; but to my own disgrace No one concerned questions his guilt. Gloucester's widow denounces 'butcher Mowbray,' and Gaunt evidently includes him among the assassins, yet the extravagance of Bolingbroke's other charges and his ready and apt defence predispose us in Mowbray's favour; and our sympathies are won by his dignified and eloquent plea for justice, and by the pathos of his life-long banishment. Nor does Shakespeare choose to let us suspect in this play what, in its successor, he goes out of his way to disclose,-that Mowbray was the object of universal loathing, as the willing tool and prompter of Richard's crimes and follies, while his opponent, Bolingbroke, without seeking popularity was dear to all hearts. 'If your father,' says Westmoreland to Mowbray's son in 2 Henry IV., 'had been victor' [in the combat with Bolingbroke] He ne'er had borne it out of Coventry : Cried hate upon him; and all their prayers and love And bless'd and graced indeed, more than the king. No such damning unanimity of hatred is visited upon Mowbray here; and the last we learn of him is a glowing eulogy on his heroic deeds in banishment Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross Against black pagans, Turks, and Saracens, a eulogy to which the historic Mowbray had no claim, and which seems, curiously enough, to have been suggested by the feats of the historic Bolingbroke. The evident nobility of both accuser and accused powerfully enforces the suspicion that the real guilt lies elsewhere, and thus heightens the sinister effect of Richard's evident wish to suppress the entire inquiry. Throughout the early Acts his despotic caprice is relentlessly emphasised. A few minutes of perfunctory consultation produce the decree which banishes the two most dangerous witnesses of his guilt; -a few minutes more pluck four years from the exile of one of them. His expedients for raising money by plundering the rich (so pointedly contrasted with Bolingbroke's astute courtesies to the poor, in the same scene, i. 4.) are not only childishly simple in themselves, but are announced with the artless frankness of a child :— Our substitutes at home shall have blank charters; Holinshed tells of the angry murmurs excited by these proceedings; Shakespeare pours forth the retributive indignation of England from the dying lips, consecrated by history to no function so lofty, of John of Gaunt; and Richard's furious outburst is equally unauthentic.1 Yet it is not chiefly with stern touches like these that Shakespeare has elaborated his wonderful study of Richard. Scorn for the ruler is never allowed to obliterate a compassionate sympathy, enforced both by the pathetic helplessness of his fate and by a certain native exquisiteness and charm of mind. At times we seem to detect something like a calculated sequence of the two effects: the damning exposure, for instance, of the scene by Gaunt's deathbed, being followed at once by the allaying pathos of the queen's wistful forebodings for her 'sweet Richard.' Indeed the queen-in Holinshed a mere child of eleven-has no other raison d'être in the drama than thus at intervals to reinforce our difficult and precarious pity for the king. His personal beauty, too, counts for something; not altogether the delicate flower-like beauty suggested by Isabelle's 'my fair rose' and Hotspur's 'Richard, that sweet lovely rose';1 for York can compare him with the paragon of English knighthood, -the Black Prince,‘His face thou hast, for even so look'd he.' When his action is least kingly we are reminded that he 'yet looks like a king.' It is noteworthy, too, that the popular indignation excited by his rule is brought into prominence only in the later stages of the action, where it appears rather as an aggravation of his sufferings than as due retribution for his misrule. In the second act it is a hearsay; in the third, after his capture, it finds expression only in the grave dialogue of the gardeners; in the fifth it becomes at length virulent and ferocious, and the 'dust thrown upon his sacred head' by the Londoners tempts us to forget what excellent reasons he had given them for throwing it. With his landing in Wales (iii. 2.) a new and subtle aspect of his character emerges, 1 1 Hen. IV. i. 3. 175. which belongs wholly to Shakespeare's imaginative reading of it. He is met at length by open resistance with which he is wholly unable to cope. Deprived of its despotic privilege of shaping the destiny of his subjects, his brilliant fancy turns upon itself and creates a dramatic spectacle of its own. He is humiliated, dethroned, imprisoned, and every trifling incident now serves as a nucleus about which he wreathes the beautiful tangles of his arabesque wit. In the two culminating scenes Shakespeare has provided such a nucleus by a slight variation of the historic conditions. The colloquy at Flint Castle (iii. 3.) is adapted from an actual interview between Richard and Northumberland alone, at Conway. The historic abdication took place privately in the Tower. Shakespeare draws Richard from prison to make a public surrender in Parliament (iv. 1.). His fall, unkingly as it is, gathers distinction and dignity from the glamour of poetry which he sheds about it; and the hunters, standing silent round their stricken. victim, fade for the moment into insignificance before the beautiful creature writhing in their toils. Once dethroned, Richard acquires the pathos of overthrow; while Bolingbroke, crowned, becomes a prey to the jealous disaffection that attends usurped power. The fifth act is a dirge over Richard and a portent of the ultimate fall of the House of Lancaster. The character of Bolingbroke is less elaborately wrought out, emphasising by its very severity of outline and colour the unsubstantial pageantry of Richard's mind. Every trait tends to heighten the contrast between the two,—a contrast hardly surpassed for subtlety and suggestiveness in the whole range of the Histories. Bolingbroke's astute compliance with. the laws is pointedly opposed to Richard's reckless and insane defiance of law. He pursues his ends by constitutional forms, knows how to bide his time, uses violence only to vindicate justice, and controls while appearing to obey. The historical Bolingbroke was not averse from ruder methods. Shakespeare tells us nothing of the plot laid by him in June 1397, in concert with Mowbray and Gloucester, to seize and imprison Richard, and his uncles York and Lancaster, and to put the rest of the council to death. His first step towards bringing Gloucester's murder home to the king is the cautious 'indirection' of accusing his accomplice Mowbray. His return from banishment has an excuse as well as a pretext in Richard's flagrant confiscation of his inheritance. Once landed, he finds himself at the head of a national uprising which bears him by its own momentum to the throne; and he is already a king in power before he has put off the obeisances of the subject. In all this we are far removed from the Marlowesque tragedy of Force (virtù), displayed in Titanic violations of the laws of man and God. Richard II.'s crimes are as heinous as those of Richard III., but they are so closely inwoven with the psychical texture of a pitifully weak and vicious nature that crime-interest is absorbed in the subtler interest of character. Richard III. is a tragedy of Guilt and Nemesis. Richard II. contains traces of the framework of such a tragedy in the murder of Gloucester, which Bolingbroke makes it his mission to avenge. But as the drama proceeds these traces fade, and Richard the aggressive despot discloses himself as a fantastic dreamer tragically thrust upon a world of laws and limits, whose rudest buffetings, instead of bringing him to his senses, only generate some new and brilliant variation of his dream. Thus out of the stirring political drama is evolved a tragedy of individual soul, conceived in a spirit more akin to that of |