COMMENTS

By SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLARS

RICHARD III

In no other play of Shakespeare's, we may surely say, is the leading character so absolutely_predominant as here. He absorbs almost the whole of the interest, and it is a triumph of Shakespeare's art that he makes us, in spite of everything, follow him with sympathy. This is partly because several of his victims are so worthless that their fate seems well deserved. Anne's weakness deprives her of our sympathy, and Richard's crime loses something of its horror when we see how lightly it is forgiven by the one who ought to take it most to heart. In spite of all his iniquities, he has wit and courage on his side—a wit which sometimes rises to Mephistophelean humor, a courage which does not fail him even in the moment of disaster, but sheds a glory over his fall which is lacking to the triumph of his coldly correct opponent. However false and hypocritical he may be towards others, he is no hypocrite to himself. He is chemically free from self-delusion, even applying to himself the most derogatory terms; and this candor in the depths of his nature appeals to us. It must be said for him, too, that threats and curses recoil from him innocuous, that neither hatred nor violence nor superior force can dash his courage. Strength of character is such a rare quality that it arouses sympathy even in a criminal. If Richard's reign had lasted longer, he would perhaps have figured in history as a ruler of the type of Louis XI: crafty, always wearing his religion on his sleeve, but far-seeing and resolute. As a matter of fact, in history as in the drama, his whole time was occupied in defending himself in the position to which he had fought his way, like a bloodthirsty beast of prey. His

figure stands before us as his contemporaries have drawn it: small and wiry, the right shoulder higher than the left, wearing his rich brown hair long in order to conceal this malformation, biting his under-lip, always restless, always with his hand on his dagger-hilt, sliding it up and down in its sheath, without entirely drawing it. Shakespeare has suceeded in throwing a halo of poetry around this tiger in human shape.-BRANDES, William Shakespeare.

Pride of intellect is the characteristic of Richard, carried to the extent of even boasting to his own mind of his villany, whilst others are present to feed his pride of superiority; as in his first speech, Act II. Sc. 1. Shaksperc here, as in all his great parts, developes in a tone of sublime morality the dreadful consequences of placing the moral in subordination to the mere intellectual being. In Richard there is a predominance of irony, accompanied with apparently blunt manners to those immediately about him, but formalized into a more set hypocrisy towards the people as represented by their magistrates.-COLERIDGE, Lectures on Shakspere.

The deformity of Richard is a circumstance as essential to the rancor of his passion as the blackness of Othelloit wounds his pride and irritates his spite, and stirs his rankling revenge. He hankers for the crown with a diseased imagination that dwells upon the very metallic symbol of royalty itself as personal ornament compensating for natural personal defects. Hence he dwells on the very name of it, and the indications are absolute that after his success his costume is to be completed by constantly wearing it—and the trait is akin to the affection for rich attire ascribed to him by history, and not unusual with the deformed. So again his opening soliloquy refers with bitterness to the disadvantage he stands at with the gay and the fair, while his pretended indifference is belied by perscvering reparation to his vanity in the influence he exerts upon them.-LLOYD, Critical Essays.

The Richard of Shakespear is towering and lofty; equally impetuous and commanding; haughty, violent, and subtle; bold and treacherous; confident in his strength as well as in his cunning; raised high by his birth, and higher by his talents and his crimes; a royal usurper, a princely hypocrite, a tyrant, and a murderer of the house of Plantagenet.

"But I was born so high:

Our aery buildeth in the cedar's top,

And dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun."

The idea conveyed in these lines (which are indeed omitted in the miserable medley acted for Richard III) is never lost sight of by Shakespear, and should not be out of the actor's mind for a moment. The restless and sanguinary Richard is not a man striving to be great, but to be greater than he is; conscious of his strength of will, his power of intellect, his daring courage, his elevated station; and making use of these advantages to commit unheard-of crimes, and to shield himself from remorse and infamy.—HAZLITT, Characters of Shakespear's Plays.

The entire play may be said to be the exhibition of the one central character of Richard; all subordinate persons are created that he may wreak his will upon them. This is quite in the manner of Marlowe. Like Marlowe also is the fierce energy of the central character, untempered by moral restraints, the heaping up of violent deeds, the absence of all reserve or mystery in the characterization, the broad and bold touches, the demoniac force, and the intensity of the whole. There is something sublime and terrible in so great and fierce a human energy as that of Richard, concentrated within one withered and distorted body. This is the evil offspring and flower of the long and cruel civil wars-this distorted creature, a hater and scorner of man, an absolute cynic, loveless and alone, disregarding all human bonds and human affections, yet full of intellect, of fire, of power. The figure of Queen Mar

garet, prophesying destruction to her adversaries, and bitterly rejoicing in the fulfilment of her prophecies, is introduced without historical warrant, but in a manner most impressive. The accumulated crimes of civil war are at last atoned for, and the evil which culminates in Richard falls with Richard from its bad eminence. The loveless solitude, haunted by terrible visions of his victims, on the night before his last battle, almost overmasters his resolution; but the stir and movement of the morning reanimates him, and he dies in a paroxysm of the rage of battle.— DOWDEN, Shakspere in the Literature Primers.

ANNE

Anne, whom he [Richard] woos at the beginning of the play, excites less contempt than pity in her frail womanliness, which is without all moral support. She hates and marries; she curses her who shall be the wife of the man who killed her first husband, and she subjects herself to this curse; afterwards as a wife she is leagued with his enemies against him. Thus, says the poet of the "Ghost of Richard,"

Women's griefs, nor loves, are dyed in grain,

For either's color time or men can stain.

Not often has a task been ventured upon like that of the poet in this instance. He produces a scene full of improbability, the principal part in which is played by this Anne, whose character is prepared or delineated in no other scene, in the most unnatural situation. Vanity, self-complacency, and weakness have all to be displayed at once; it is the part of the matron of Ephesus in the tragedy, though it is neither incredible nor forced. We must at the same time bear in view that the murder of her relatives admits of excuse as among the unavoidable evils of war and defense. We must take into account the extraordinary degree of dissimulation, which deceives even experienced men; and for this reason the artist who is to play Rich

ard must woo rather as an actor than as a lover, but must yet go to the very limits of deception even as regards the initiated spectator. We have further to consider how the part of repentance and atonement becomes a valiant soldier, and how pardonable is the womanly weakness which delights in the idea of endeavoring to support and save such a penitent. We must remember that the unwonted mildness of the tyrant is far more effective than the gentleness of the weak; and in the historical examples of our own day we have seen how tender feminine characters have been united to the most brutal, in the consciousness of at any rate restraining the human barbarity at home.GERVINUS, Shakspeare Commentaries.

RICHMOND

The race of Henry IV is ultimately quite rooted out; of the house of York, with the exception of the childless Richard,1 there survives but one daughter of Edward IV, to connect the old with the new era. This had to be. The deliverer and founder of the new era had necessarily to be of a different blood; yet his title had, at the same time, in some measure to mediate between the past and the future. Such was the case with Henry, duke of Richmond, afterwards Henry VII, and the husband of Elizabeth, the above-named daughter of Edward IV—of the House of Lancaster (Gaunt), it is true, but not a descendant of Henry IV. He appears a gentle, pious youth, not a distinguished or eminent person. For the age is so demoralized that it not only cannot offer any resistance to the tyrant Richard, but is also unable to provide a deliverer from within itself. Very justly, therefore, Henry considers himself "God's captain," and does not center his hope in himself, in the prevailing circumstances or in the strength of his army; it is simply his consciousness that it is the will of God that gives him the energy he exhibits 1 His son, whom Shakespeare does not mention, died one year before him.