But this is making Richard out an improbable character? Perhaps it is so; and our purpose was not so much to vindicate the soliloquies, as to suggest whether the charge so pertinently started touching them will not hold equally against the whole delineation. If we be right in thinking that the speeches in question strictly cohere with his general action, it follows that both are in fault, or neither so that if the Poet be here in error, he is at the least consistently so; though in this case consistency be no jewel. Instead, therefore, of rejecting the fine criticism quoted above, we should rather incline to extend it in some sort over the substance and body of the play; in the very conception of which we seem to have somewhat of the mistake, so incident to youthful genius, of seeking for excellence rather by transcending nature, or forcing her into a better path, than by falling heartily in, and going smoothly along, with her. -That we have not spoken altogether without book, may be seen by the choice observations of Coleridge. "Pride of intellect," says he, "is the characteristic of Richard, carried to the extent of even boasting to his own mind of his villainy, whilst others are present to feed his pride of superiority. Shakespeare here 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." It is plain that such a man as Richard must either cease to be himself, or else must be "himself alone." Isolation, virtual or actual, is his vital air, the breath, the necessary condition, of his life. One of his character without his position would have to find solitude; Richard, by his position, has the alternative of creating it the former must needs be where none others are; the latter, where all others are, in effect, as though they were not. For society is in its nature a complection of mutualities and reciprocal influences, and every rule pertaining to it works both ways: it is a partnership of individualities, some of them subordinate, indeed, and some superior, yet not in such sort but as to presuppose a net-work of ties running and recurring from each to each, so that no one can urge a right without inferring a duty, or claim a bond without owning himself bound. But Richard's individuality can abide no partner, either as equal, or as second, or in any other degree. For partnership is of members the same in kind, differing only in degree; but whoever would move where Richard moves, must do so as of another kind. There is no sharing any thing with him, in however unequal portions; no acting with him, as original and self-moving agents, but only from him, as the objects and passive recipients of his activity: such is the form and scope of his individuality, that other men's cannot stand in mere subordination to it, but must either crush it, or fly from it, or be absorbed into it; and the moment any one goes to act otherwise than as a limb of his person or organ of his will, there is a virtual declaration of war between them, and the issue must hang on a trial of strength or of stratagem. Hence comes it that there is, properly speaking, no interaction between Richard and the other persons of the drama. He is the all-in-all of the play, the soul of every thing that is done, the theme of every thing that is said there is scarce a thought, or feeling, or purpose expressed, but what is either from him, or in some way concerning him, he being the author, the subject, or the occasion of it. And herein is this play chiefly distinguished from all the others, and, certainly, as a work of art, not distinguished for the better, that the entire action, in all its parts and stages, so far at least as it has any human origin or purpose, both springs from the hero as its source, and determines in him as its end. So that the drama is not properly a composition of cooperative characters, mutually developing and developed; but the prolonged yet hurried outcome of a single character, to which all the other persons serve but as exponents and conductors; as if he were a volume of electrical activity, disclosing himself by means of others, and quenching their active powers at the very moment of doing so. Observe, we say the other persons, not characters; for however much their forms meet the eye, their inward being is for the most part held in abeyance and kept from transpiring by the virtual ubiquity of the hero. All which may go far to account for the great and lasting popularity of this play on the stage. There being no one to share with the hero the action and interest of the piece, this of course renders it all the better for theatrical starring; for which reason most of the great actors have naturally been fond of appearing in it, and play-goers of seeing them in it. Besides, the hero is himself essentially an actor, though an actor of many parts, sometimes one after another, and sometimes all of them together; and the fact that his character is much of it assumed, and carried through as a matter of art, probably makes it somewhat easier for another to assume it. At all events, the difficulty, one would suppose, must be much less in proportion to the stage-effect, than in reproducing the deep tragic passions of Lear and Othello, as they burst from the original founts of nature. This want of dramatic balance and equipoise resulted naturally, no doubt, from the subject, and, however detracting from the play as a work of art, may be considered one of its excellences as a representation of history. For by reason of this unartistic disproportion the play sets forth with the more awful emphasis the malignant working of that tyranny, where a single person arrogates to himself the life of a whole people, and makes all their thoughts, feelings, aims, interests, rights, and affections, serve but as the sporting-ground of his overmastering and remorseless will; - a state of things which is sure to produce, if indeed it do not rather presuppose, a thorough disorganization of society. Richard's all-controlling energy of purpose, his thorough mastery of himself and every thing about him, has its strongest exhibition in the catastrophe. He cannot indeed prolong his life, but he makes his death serve in the highest degree the end for which he has lived; dying in a perfect transport and ecstasy of heroism, insomuch that we may truly say, "nothing in his life became him like the leaving it." Nay, he may even be said to compel his own death, when a higher Power than man's has cut off all other means of honour and triumph. Herein, too, the Poet followed history; but in the prerogatives of his art he found a way, which history knew not of, to satisfy the moral feelings, representing him as in Hands that can afford to let him defy all the powers of human avengement. Inaccessible to earthly strokes, or accessible to them only in a way that adds to his earthly honour, yet this dreadful impunity is recompensed in the agonies of an embosomed hell; and our moral nature reaps a stern satisfaction in the retributions which are rendered vocal and articulate by the ghosts that are made to haunt his sleeping moments. For even so God sometimes apparently chooses to vindicate His law by taking the punishment directly and exclusively into His own hands. And, surely, His vengeance is never so terrible, as when subordinate ministries are thus dispensed with. The only considerable exception to what we have been saying is Queen Margaret, whose individuality shoulders itself in face to face with Richard's, her passionate impulse wrestling evenly with his deliberate purpose, and her ferocious temper being provoked into larger and hotter eruptions by all attempts at restraint or intimidation. This, to be sure, is partly because she can do nothing; while at the same time her tongue is all the more able and eager to blast, forasmuch as she has no hand to strike. Long suffering has deepened her fierceness into sublimity: at once vindictive and broken-hearted, her part runs into a most impressive blending of the terrible and the pathetic. Walpole, in his Historic Doubts, remarks, that in this play the Poet" seems to deduce the woes of the house of York from the curses which Queen Margaret had vented against them." Might it not as well be said that her woes are deduced from the curse formerly laid upon her by the duke of York? We can perceive no deduction in either case: each seems but to have a foresight of future woe to the other as the proper consequence of past or present crimes. The truth is, Margaret's curses do but proclaim those moral retributions of which God is the author, and nature His minister; and perhaps the only way her former character could be carried on into these scenes was by making her seek indemnity for her woes in ringing changes upon theirs PERSONS REPRESENTED. KING EDWARD THE FOURTH. EDWARD, Prince of Wales, his Sons. A young Son of Clarence. his Brothers. HENRY TUDOR, Earl of Richmond. THOMAS BOURCHIER, Primate of England, and Cardinal. THOMAS ROTHERHAM, Archbishop of York. JOHN MORTON, Bishop of Ely. HENRY STAFFORD, Duke of Buckingham. JOHN HOWARD, Duke of Norfolk. THOMAS, his Son, Earl of Surrey. ANTHONY WOODVILLE, Earl Rivers, Brother to Elizabeth. THOMAS GREY, Marquess of Dorset, Sons of Elizabeth. WILLIAM LORD HASTINGS. THOMAS LORD STANLEY. ELIZABETH, Queen of Edward IV. MARGARET, Widow of Henry VI. CECILY, Duchess of York, Mother of Edward IV. Lords, and other Attendants; two Gentlemen, a Pursuivant, Scrivener, Citizens, Murderers, Messengers, Ghosts, Soldiers, &c. SCENE, England. KING RICHARD III. ACT I. SCENE I. London. A Street. Enter RICHARD. Rich. Now is the winter of our discontent Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths; 1 The cognizance of Edward IV. was a sun, in memory of the three suns which are said to have appeared at the battle he gained over the Lancastrians at Mortimer's Cross. See 3 Henry VI. Act ii. sc. 1, note 5. 2 Dances. 3 That is, steeds caparisoned or clothed in the trappings of The word is properly barded, from equus bardatus. war. 4"Is the warlike sound of drum and trump turned to the soft noise of lyre and lute? the neighing of barbed steeds, whose loudness filled the air with terror, and whose breaths dimmed the sun with smoke, converted to delicate tunes and amorous glances?" -Lyly's Alexander and Campaspe, 1584. |