Appreciations, with an Essay on Style Part 8

Then (of Bolingbroke)

Ere the crown he looks for live in peace, Ten thousand b.l.o.o.d.y crowns of mothers' sons Shall ill become the flower of England's face; Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace To scarlet indignation, and bedew My pastures' gra.s.s with faithful English blood.--

[193]

Why have they dared to march?--

asks York,

So many miles upon her peaceful bosom, Frighting her pale-fac'd visages with war?--

waking, according to Richard,

Our peace, which in our country's cradle, Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep:--

bedrenching "with crimson tempest"

The fresh green lap of fair king Richard's land:--

frighting "fair peace" from "our quiet confines," laying

The summer's dust with showers of blood, Rained from the wounds of slaughter'd Englishmen:

bruising

Her flowerets with the armed hoofs Of hostile paces.

Perhaps it is not too fanciful to note in this play a peculiar recoil from the mere instruments of warfare, the contact of the "rude ribs,"

the "flint bosom," of Barkloughly Castle or Pomfret or

Julius Caesar's ill-erected tower:

the

Boisterous untun'd drums With harsh-resounding trumpets' dreadful bray And grating shock of wrathful iron arms.

It is as if the lax, soft beauty of the king took effect, at least by contrast, on everything beside. One gracious prerogative, certainly, Shakespeare's [194] English kings possess: they are a very eloquent company, and Richard is the most sweet-tongued of them all. In no other play perhaps is there such a flush of those gay, fresh, variegated flowers of speech--colour and figure, not lightly attached to, but fused into, the very phrase itself--which Shakespeare cannot help dispensing to his characters, as in this "play of the Deposing of King Richard the Second," an exquisite poet if he is nothing else, from first to last, in light and gloom alike, able to see all things poetically, to give a poetic turn to his conduct of them, and refreshing with his golden language the tritest aspects of that ironic contrast between the pretensions of a king and the actual necessities of his destiny. What a garden of words! With him, blank verse, infinitely graceful, deliberate, musical in inflexion, becomes indeed a true "verse royal," that rhyming lapse, which to the Shakespearian ear, at least in youth, came as the last touch of refinement on it, being here doubly appropriate. His eloquence blends with that fatal beauty, of which he was so frankly aware, so amiable to his friends, to his wife, of the effects of which on the people his enemies were so much afraid, on which Shakespeare himself dwells so attentively as the "royal blood" comes and goes in the face with his rapid changes of temper. As happens with sensitive natures, it attunes him to a congruous suavity of manners, by which anger itself became flattering: [195] it blends with his merely youthful hopefulness and high spirits, his sympathetic love for gay people, things, apparel--"his cote of gold and stone, valued at thirty thousand marks," the novel Italian fashions he preferred, as also with those real amiabilities that made people forget the darker touches of his character, but never tire of the pathetic rehearsal of his fall, the meekness of which would have seemed merely abject in a less graceful performer.

Yet it is only fair to say that in the painstaking "revival" of King Richard the Second, by the late Charles Kean, those who were very young thirty years ago were afforded much more than Shakespeare's play could ever have been before--the very person of the king based on the stately old portrait in Westminster Abbey, "the earliest extant contemporary likeness of any English sovereign," the grace, the winning pathos, the sympathetic voice of the player, the tasteful archaeology confronting vulgar modern London with a scenic reproduction, for once really agreeable, of the London of Chaucer. In the hands of Kean the play became like an exquisite performance on the violin.

The long agony of one so gaily painted by nature's self, from his "tragic abdication" till the hour in which he

Sluiced out his innocent soul thro' streams of blood,

was for playwrights a subject ready to hand, and [196] became early the theme of a popular drama, of which some have fancied surviving favourite fragments in the rhymed parts of Shakespeare's work.

The king Richard of Yngland Was in his flowris then regnand: But his flowris efter sone Fadyt, and ware all undone:--

says the old chronicle. Strangely enough, Shakespeare supposes him an over-confident believer in that divine right of kings, of which people in Shakespeare's time were coming to hear so much; a general right, sealed to him (so Richard is made to think) as an ineradicable personal gift by the touch--stream rather, over head and breast and shoulders--of the "holy oil" of his consecration at Westminster; not, however, through some oversight, the genuine balm used at the coronation of his successor, given, according to legend, by the Blessed Virgin to Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Richard himself found that, it was said, among other forgotten treasures, at the crisis of his changing fortunes, and vainly sought reconsecration therewith--understood, wistfully, that it was reserved for his happier rival. And yet his coronation, by the pageantry, the amplitude, the learned care, of its order, so lengthy that the king, then only eleven years of age, and fasting, as a communicant at the ceremony, was carried away in a faint, fixed the type under which it has ever [197]

since continued. And nowhere is there so emphatic a reiteration as in Richard the Second of the sentiment which those singular rites were calculated to produce.

Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm from an anointed king,--

as supplementing another, almost supernatural, right.--"Edward's seven sons," of whom Richard's father was one,

Were as seven phials of his sacred blood.

But this, too, in the hands of Shakespeare, becomes for him, like any other of those fantastic, ineffectual, easily discredited, personal graces, as capricious in its operation on men's wills as merely physical beauty, kindling himself to eloquence indeed, but only giving double pathos to insults which "barbarism itself" might have pitied--the dust in his face, as he returns, through the streets of London, a prisoner in the train of his victorious enemy.

How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face!

he cries, in that most poetic invention of the mirror scene, which does but reinforce again that physical charm which all confessed. The sense of "divine right" in kings is found to act not so much as a secret of power over others, as of infatuation to themselves. And of all those personal gifts the one which alone never altogether fails him is just that royal utterance, his [198] appreciation of the poetry of his own hapless lot, an eloquent self-pity, infecting others in spite of themselves, till they too become irresistibly eloquent about him.

In the Roman Pontifical, of which the order of Coronation is really a part, there is no form for the inverse process, no rite of "degradation," such as that by which an offending priest or bishop may be deprived, if not of the essential quality of "orders," yet, one by one, of its outward dignities. It is as if Shakespeare had had in mind some such inverted rite, like those old ecclesiastical or military ones, by which human hardness, or human justice, adds the last touch of unkindness to the execution of its sentences, in the scene where Richard "deposes" himself, as in some long, agonising ceremony, reflectively drawn out, with an extraordinary refinement of intelligence and variety of piteous appeal, but also with a felicity of poetic invention, which puts these pages into a very select cla.s.s, with the finest "vermeil and ivory" work of Chatterton or Keats.

Fetch hither Richard that in common view He may surrender!--

And Richard more than concurs: he throws himself into the part, realises a type, falls gracefully as on the world's stage.--Why is he sent for?

To do that office of thine own good will Which tired majesty did make thee offer.--

Now mark me! how I will undo myself.

[199] "Hath Bolingbroke deposed thine intellect?" the Queen asks him, on his way to the Tower:--

Hath Bolingbroke Deposed thine intellect? hath he been in thy heart?

And in truth, but for that advent.i.tious poetic gold, it would be only "plume-plucked Richard."--

I find myself a traitor with the rest, For I have given here my soul's consent To undeck the pompous body of a king.

He is duly reminded, indeed, how

That which in mean men we ent.i.tle patience Is pale cold cowardice in n.o.ble b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Yet at least within the poetic bounds of Shakespeare's play, through Shakespeare's bountiful gifts, his desire seems fulfilled.--

O! that I were as great As is my grief.

And his grief becomes nothing less than a central expression of all that in the revolutions of Fortune's wheel goes down in the world.

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, [200] 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!

his somewhat abject fear of death, turning to acquiescence at moments of extreme weariness:--

My large kingdom for a little grave!