and the Church speaks through the Bishop of Carlisle in solemn warning of the ills that follow upon usurpation :- "My Lord of Hereford here, whom you call king, Is a foul traitor to proud Hereford's king; Shall here inhabit, and this land be called That ever fell upon this curséd earth. Lest child, child's children, cry against you--woe! " The civil wars here prophesied are shown in the two plays on the reign of Bolingbroke as King Henry IV. But within the play of "King Richard II.," Shakespeare gives in the Fifth Act a pathetic, typical instance, that brings home to the mind what the grief is when we have raised "this house against this house." The last words of the Fourth Act are between the Bishop of Carlisle, the Abbot, and Aumerle, and they point to a plot against the new-made King. The Fifth Act begins by again drawing sympathy to Richard through the sorrow of the Queen. Their parting is shown, and in it the harshness of Northumberland, who also in the deposition scene had pressed most hardly against the afflicted and repentant Richard. "North. My lord, the mind of Bolingbroke is changed; You must to Pomfret, not unto the Tower. And, madam, there is order ta'en for you : With all swift speed you must away to France. Richard. Northumberland, thou ladder, wherewith The mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne, The time shall not be many hours of age And he shall think that thou, which know'st the way Being ne'er so little urged, another way To pluck him headlong from the usurpéd throne." Shakespeare carries the memory of this prophecy on into the Second Part of "King Henry IV." (Act III., sc. 1), when the afflicted king asks "Which of you was by,— You, cousin Nevil, as I may remember,- Foretelling this same time's condition, And the division of our amity." The next two scenes of the Fifth Act are designed to show the misery of civil war, by the home picture of a house divided against itself. York's son, Aumerle-that is, Albemarle; he was Duke of Albemarle, and had been King Richard's Lord High Constable--has joined the plot for the killing of the new king when he goes to the jousts at Oxford. The old York has been telling his wife of the sad spectacle of Richard's passage in the train of Bolingbroke through London streets, where " no man cried, God save him, though "-had not God, for some strong purpose, steeled And barbarism itself have pitied him. But Heaven hath a hand in these events, To whose high will we bound our calm contents. And, madam, you must call him Rutland now. So pledged, he finds on his son evidence of deadly treason in the details of the plot to kill the king. The loyal father then will hasten to denounce the son; the mother pleads for mercy to her only child: "Why, York, what wilt thou do? Have we more sons, or are we like to have? He is as like thee as a man may be, Not like to me or any of my kin, And yet I love him." The household struggle, with swift changes of deep emotion, passes to the chamber of the king, and has brought home to the mind of many a playgoer, through tears, a sense of what is meant by civil war. Of the scene in the dungeon at Pomfret, which has for its historical date February, 1400, it is enough to note one passage in the repentant Richard's thoughts, before he finds consolation in the friendship of a poor groom who had served in his stables, and then fell in brave resistance to his murderers. He hears music played without : "Music do I hear? Ha, ha, keep time.-How sour your sweet music is So is it in the music of men's lives: And here have I the daintiness of ear To check time broke in a disordered string, I wasted time, and now time doth waste me." The central thought, then, in the play of "King Richard II." is of youth, in its weakness, yielding to the meaner friendships and the meaner pleasures of the world; unable to recover the lost honour, but sinking into crime and ending life in bitterness of sorrows that may yet bring with them the blessing of repentance. And since this truth of life is drawn from events of history, and the calamity brought down by a misguided king upon himself and his people, is rebellion with usurpation, Shakespeare is careful so to construct his play that no sense of just punishment for great wrong-doing shall make rebellion or The Two usurpation appear just, while there shall be no concealment of the greatness of the wrong done, no dishonest softening of the offence. The First Part of "King Henry IV." was entered in the Stationers' Register by Andrew Wise, on the twenty-fifth of February, 1598 (new style), as "A booke entitled the Historye of Henry the iiijth, with his battaile at Shrewsburye against Henry Hottspurre of the Northe, with the conceipted mirthe of Sir John Falstoff." Of this there were as many as six editions (1598, 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, 1622) before the publication of the first Folio in 1623. After 1623 there were two more quarto editions-those of 1632 and 1639. No other play of Shakespeare's except "Richard III." was, within that period, so frequently reprinted. Shakespeare's trilogy, of the two parts of "King Henry IV." and "King Henry V.," was developed from a single old play, rude in form, of which the first known edition was printed in the same year with the first edition of the first part of Shakespeare's "King Henry IV." It was entitled "The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth : Containing the Honourable Battell of Agin-court: As it was plaide by the Queenes Maiesties Players," and was printed by Thomas Creede, to whom the book, published in 1598, had been entered at Stationers' Hall on the fourteenth of May, 1594. Very probably it was first published in that year. Of the 1598 edition only one copy has come down to us, and that is in the Bodleian Library. Of preceding editions not even one copy has been discovered. "The Queen's Majesty's Players" remain on the title-page of 1598, though the company acting under that name was formed in 1583 and came to an end in 1594. The date of the entry in the Stationers' Register would indicate that the "Famous Victories " was among the last plays acted by that company. In the diary of Philip Henslowe, there is note of an acting of "Harry the Fifth," which he marks "ne.," as a "new enterlude," on the twenty-eighth of November, 1595. This, it has been suggested, might, as one of the last pieces produced by the Queen's Players, have come into Henslowe's possession and been entered by him as new. But the acting of "The Famous Victories" would be carried back to a date before the death of the popular comedian, Richard Tarleton-who died on the third of September, 1588-if there be truth in a story given in the second part of "Tarleton's Jests." In the acting of a play of "Henry V." at the "Bull," in Bishopsgate, Knell, it is said, who played Henry V., gave Tarleton, as Chief Justice, so sounding a box on the ear that the whole house laughed. When Tarleton had gone out as judge, he came in again in his clown's clothes and asked the actors :-"What news?' 'Oh,' saith one, 'hadst thou been here thou shouldest have seen Prince Henry hit the judge a terrible box on the ear.' 'What, man?' said Tarleton, 'strike a judge?' 'It is true, i'faith,' said the other. 'No other like,' said Tarleton, and it could not but be terrible to the judge, when the report so terrifies me, that methinks the blow remains still on my cheek, that it burns me.' The people laughed at this mightily; and to this day I have heard it commended for rare." The play of "The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth" attempts no flight of poetry or wit, but in the simplest words that will convey its sense attempts a stage presentment of the idle prince who grew to be a great victorious king. When the young prince is robbing the king's receivers, with Ned and Tom and Sir John Oldcastle, and boxing the ears of the Chief Justice who will not restore to him his man, the thief, who robbed Derrick the carrier on Gad's Hill, there are no more words spent than suffice to tell what is doing. Being idle and dissolute they swear; but one oath, "Gog's wounds," well repeated, answers every |