No! Shakespeare's Kings are not, nor are meant to be, great men: rather, little or quite ordinary humanity, thrust upon greatness, with those pathetic results, the natural self-pity of the weak heightened in them into irresistible appeal to others as the net result of their royal prerogative. One after another, they seem to lie composed in Shakespeare's embalming pages, with just that touch of nature about them, making the whole world akin, which has infused into their tombs at Westminster a rare poetic grace. It is that irony of Kingship, the sense that it is in its happiness child's play, in its sorrows, after all, but children's grief, which gives its finer accent to all the changeful feeling of these wonderful speeches: the great meekness of the graceful, wild creature, tamed at last,— "Give Richard leave to live till Richard die! And as sometimes happens with children, he attains contentment finally in the merely passive recognition of superior strength, in the naturalness of the result of the great battle as a matter of course, and experiences something of the royal prerogative of poetry to obscure, or at least to attune and soften men's griefs.-PATER. EXILE The right assumed by sovereign power to trifle at its will with the happiness of others as a matter of course, or to remit its exercise as a matter of favor, is strikingly shown in the sentence of banishment so unjustly pronounced on Bolingbroke and Mowbray, and in what Bolingbroke says when four years of his banishment are taken off, with as little reason. "How long a time lies in one little word! Four lagging winters and four wanton springs A more affecting image of the loneliness of a state of exile can hardly be given than by what Bolingbroke afterwards observes of his having "sighed his English breath in foreign clouds"; or than that conveyed in Mowbray's complaint at being banished for life. "The language I have learned these forty years, And now my tongue's use is to me no more Or like a cunning instrument cas'd up, How very beautiful is all this, and at the same time how very English too!-HAZLITT, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. RICHARD II His effeminate outward beauty, which wins for him the title of "sweet lovely rose," is matched by a puerile grace of fancy that tinges the facts of life with an unreal, pseudo-poetic glow. Instead of grappling with its stern necessities, he takes an æsthetic delight in the situations which it provides. His whole attitude is that of an onlooker, a dilettante whose will has never been braced to mold and fashion circumstances; he is, as Dowden has summed it up, "an amateur in living, not an artist." Thus, on an occasion which requires the resolute exercise of authority, he is satisfied with making a grandiloquent com parison, while he suffers his command to be defied, and is forced to fix a day for the ordeal of battle between the rival lords. But in the lists at Coventry he gives more signal proof of impulsive weakness. Before the combatants can close, he flings down his warder, stops the tourney, and banishes Bolingbroke for six years and Mowbray for life. This act, as Mowbray's son asserts at a later period in Henry IV, Part II, was the beginning of all the evils that befell him later: "O when the king did throw his warder down, For Richard, alarmed at the popular manifestations in Bolingbroke's favor, sends to perpetual exile the man whom he loves, and who would have proved faithful to him, while he inflicts a lighter and yet exasperating penalty upon the aspiring lord whom he secretly fears-Boas, Shakspere and his Predecessors. THE QUEEN s_un The queen, even in the time of prosperity, was oppressed by a "nameless woe," and looked towards the future with a foreboding dread, i.e. with a conviction that Richard's unholy actions could lead only to misery; yet she has neither the energy nor the will to prevent that which was in her power. She is the partner of her husband's kingly extravagance, and, at the death-bed of old Gaunt, listens tacitly to his fruitless warnings, to Richard's insulting speeches, and to his command to seize the revenues and property of the duchy of Lancaster, therefore, she justly shares her consort's fate, Misfortune, however, raises both above their fate, and shows us the sparks of light which slumbered in Richard's originally noble nature. For he is not merely a weakly, shallow, and dissolute voluptuary, he is intelligent, rich in imagination, of strong but too excitable feelings, and of acute judgment (as is proved by his remarks upon young Bolingbroke, who had been banished); but his lively imagination blinds his judgment, the exuberance of his feelings overpowers his will. He is devotedly fond of his wife, his friends and favorites, but his wife is like a weak and pliant reed, incapable of affording him support, and his friends are common, selfish flatterers, who only encourage him in his weaknesses and take advantage of his favor in the meanest and most selfish manner. ULRICI, Shakspeare's Dramatic Art. JOHN OF GAUNT AND THE DUKE OF YORK The Duke of York is a good sketch, but in his senile bluster of words, and his weak reversal of them when any action is required, and in his soft yielding to fate, he is only a faded representation of what Richard, without his touch of genius, might have been as an old man. Even in his furious demand for his son's death as a pledge of his loyalty to Bolingbroke a scene which is quite unworthy of Shakespeare-he is another image of the excess into which weakness of will is so often betrayed. His haste, his fury, his exaggerated defiance of natural feelinghow could a father ask the King to slay his son?-are nothing more than weakness desperately trying to convince itself that it is strong, a condition of soul into which Richard falls again and again. His loyalty, which is his religion, is first broken down by the iniquity of the King, yet in principle is retained. Then circumstance steals his principle away, and he joins Bolingbroke. Then he recovers his principle by transferring his loyalty to Bolingbroke, In a word, he is a very old man, and his words and acts are carefully studied from weak old age. The sketch may well be contrasted with that of Gaunt, who is as old a man, but who has not lost his will, his power, or his courage, He stays but a short time, only in two scenes, but we see him as if he were alive before us; one of the old school of Edward III; chivalrous, honorable, fit for the works and the trials of war, as fit as Richard was unfit for them; of deep experience in life, yet tender; rigid in justice even to blaming the King; honoring his own caste, yet loving the people; knowing his duties to them and pressing those duties on the King; loving his son, yet loving England more. Old and with trembling angers of age, as well as its sorrows; old and dying, but never truer, more valiant, more patriotic, and more sorrowful than in death. As we stand by his deathbed, we see the trouble of the land and presage the doom of Richard.-BROOKE, On Ten Plays of Shakespeare. The characters of old John of Gaunt and of his brother York, uncles to the King, the one stern and foreboding, the other honest, good-natured, doing all for the best, and therefore doing nothing, are well kept up. The speech of the former, in praise of England, is one of the most eloquent that ever was penned.-HAZLITT, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. THE DEATH OF JOHN OF GAUNT The death scene of John of Gaunt is a dramatic invention, but Shakspeare has made an admirable historical use of it, by putting into the mouth of Lancaster, not only a dying man's prophecy of the ruin that is to follow Richard's riotous misrule, but also one of those magnificent poetic eulogies on England, by which the poet has fostered the national feeling of his countrymen. The misgovernment in Richard's reign grieves the spirit of the dying Lancaster; because remembering the splendor and the strength of his father's reign, he thinks of that small island England, as "This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, |