be certain, in a spasm of battle-rage. Clarence we remember for the sake of his romantic dream ; Edward IV we remember for the sake of his selfindulgent folly as a peacemaker, who would build a substantial structure upon the sands. We remember Richard as unalterable craft, almost indomitable force, and in his very loyalty to evil he wrings from us a certain feeling of admiration. With his extinction enters Peace, and the civil wounds are stopp'd'.

The fortunes of the play upon the stage have been singular. In Shakespeare's day it was undoubtedly popular, not only with readers, but also with spectators in the theatre. The name of the great actor Burbage was closely associated with that of Richard. In Corbet's Iter Boreale (1618-21) he tells of the host who served as cicerone over the field of the battle of Bosworth:

Where he mistook a player for a King.

For when he would have sayd, King Richard dyed, And call'd-A horse! a horse!-he Burbidge cry'de. After the Restoration the play does not seem to have been revived; we do not hear of Betterton's having appeared in the chief part; we do not hear of Pepys having witnessed a performance. In 1700 it was recast and in great part rewritten by Colley Cibber, but at first a scrupulous Master of the Revels would not permit the presentation of his first Act, in which King Henry VI is killed. Not many readers of the present day are aware of the great transformation of Shakespeare's text effected by Cibber. From seven other historical plays he imported various passages; he retained less than a fourth of the original; he added over a thousand lines of his own. Clarence and his dream wholly disappear. The inherent vulgarity of the play, as revised,' writes Mr. A. H. Paget, 'is shown by an interpolated passage in which Richard deliberately sets himself to kill his wife by neglect and cruelty. Equally commonplace and morbid is a scene in which we are brought to the very threshold of the chamber

where the children are smothered, and there see Richard prowling about and moralizing on his wickedness.' Yet it cannot be denied that Cibber's play was theatrically effective; it held the stage, to the exclusion of Shakespeare's tragedy, for more than a century. Some of the most telling stage hits-such as the line 'Off with his head! So much for Buckingham! '—are of Cibber's invention. It was in Cibber's Richard III that Garrick first came forward in 1741, at Goodman's Fields, as A gentleman (who never appeared on any stage),' and entranced the spectators. It was in Cibber's play that Edmund Kean in the early years of the nineteenth century astonished the audience of Drury Lane. It was Cibber, not Shakespeare, whom J. P. Kemble revised for Covent Garden. In 1821 Macready restored something approaching the original to the theatre, but in his Diary he acknowledges that the experiment was only partially successful". 'Our audiences,' he says, were accustomed to the coarse jests and ad captandum speeches of Cibber, and would have condemned the omission of such uncharacteristic claptraps as Off with his head! So much for Buckingham!" or such bombast as: Hence, babbling dreams: you threaten

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here in vain. Conscience avaunt! Richard's himself again! In deference to the taste of the times, the passages, as well as similar ones, were retained.'

Since the days of Cooke and Kean the greatest of stage Richards was undoubtedly Irving, who presented Shakespeare's play at the Lyceum in 1877. He was essentially a romantic artist, and the villany of Richard, in his rendering, was lit up by fine ecstasies of lurid mirth, subtle irony, and the very revelry of evil. With this the contrast of Richard in his tent before the battle of Bosworth, for a little time broken, agitated, and alone, became doubly impressive. We went to the theatre expecting perhaps to see Irving rather than Richard; but we saw both, and for us from that hour they were inseparably one.

KING EDWARD THE FOURTH.

EDWARD, Prince of Wales; afterwards

King Edward the Fifth,

RICHARD, Duke of York,

GEORGE, Duke of Clarence,

Sons to the King.

RICHARD, Duke of Gloucester, Brothers to the King.

afterwards King Richard

the Third,

A young Son of Clarence.

HENRY, Earl of Richmond; afterwards King Henry the Seventh. CARDINAL BOURCHIER, Archbishop of Canterbury.

THOMAS ROTHERHAM, Archbishop of York.

JOHN MORTON, Bishop of Ely.

DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM.

DUKE OF NORFOLK.

EARL OF SURREY, his Son.

EARL RIVERS, Brother to King Edward's Queen.
MARQUESS OF DORSET, and LORD GREY, her Sons.
EARL OF OXFORD.

LORD HASTINGS.

LORD STANLEY, called also EARL OF DERBY.

LORD LOVEL.

SIR THOMAS VAUGHAN.
SIR RICHARD RATCLIFF.

SIR WILLIAM CATESBY.
SIR JAMES TYRRELL.
SIR JAMES BLOUNT.

SIR WALTER HERBERT.

SIR ROBERT BRAKENBURY, Lieutenant of the Tower.

SIR WILLIAM BRANDON.

CHRISTOPHER URSWICK, a Priest.

Another Priest.

Lord Mayor of London. Sheriff of Wiltshire.

TRESSEL and BERKELEY, Gentlemen attending on Lady Anne.

ELIZABETH, Queen of King Edward the Fourth.

MARGARET, Widow of King Henry the Sixth.

DUCHESS OF YORK, Mother to King Edward the Fourth, Clarence, and Gloucester.

LADY ANNE, Widow of Edward, Prince of Wales, Son to King Henry the Sixth; afterwards married to the Duke of Gloucester.

LADY MARGARET PLANTAGENET, a young Daughter of Clarence. Lords, and other Attendants; two Gentlemen, a Pursuivant, Scrivener, Citizens, Murderers, Messengers, Ghosts of those murdered by Richard the Third, Soldiers, &c.

SCENE.-England.

THE TRAGEDY OF

KING RICHARD THE THIRD

ACT I.

SCENE I.-London. A Street.

Enter GLOUCESTER.

GLOUCESTER. Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings;
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visag'd war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now,-instead of mounting barbed steeds,
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,-
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

But I, that am not shap'd for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;

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I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty 16
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me, as I halt by them ;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:

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And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false, and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says, that G

Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.

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Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence comes.

Enter CLARENCE, guarded, and BRAKENBURY. Brother, good day: what means this armed guard That waits upon your Grace ?

CLARENCE.

His majesty, Tendering my person's safety, hath appointed This conduct to convey me to the Tower. GLOUCESTER. Upon what cause?

CLARENCE.
GLOUCESTER.

yours;

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Because my name is George. Alack! my lord, that fault is none of

He should, for that, commit your godfathers. belike his majesty hath some intent

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That you should be new-christen'd in the Tower.
But what's the matter, Clarence? may I know?
CLARENCE. Yea, Richard, when I know; for I pro-
test

As yet I do not: but, as I can learn,
He hearkens after prophecies and dreams;
And from the cross-row plucks the letter G,
And says a wizard told him that by G
His issue disinherited should be;

And, for my name of George begins with G,
It follows in his thought that I am he.
These, as I learn, and such like toys as these,
Have mov'd his highness to commit me now.

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