William Shakespeare Part 6

and

"I have heard you say, That we shall see and know our friends in heaven.

If that be true, I shall see my boy again,"

and

"When I shall meet him in the court of heaven I shall not know him."

The characters in this truly n.o.ble play daunt the reader with a sense of their creator's power. It is difficult to know intimately any human soul, even with love as a lamp. Shakespeare's mind goes n.o.bly into these souls, bearing his great light. It is very wonderful that the mind who saw man clearest should see him with such exaltation.

_King Richard II._

_Written._ (?)

_Published._ 1597.

_Source of the Plot._ The lives of King Richard II and King Henry IV in Raphael Holinshed's _Chronicles_.

_The Fable._ I. The Duke of Gloucester, uncle of King Richard, has died under suspicious circ.u.mstances at Calais, after an accusation of treachery. Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, the King's cousin, accuses Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, of treachery to the King and of the murder of the Duke of Gloucester. The King appoints a day on which the two disputants may try their cause by combat. On their arrival at the lists he banishes them both, Bolingbroke for six years, Mowbray for ever. After they have gone to fulfil their sentence, the King plans to subdue the rebels in Ireland. He prays that the death of his uncle, John of Gaunt, the wisest man about him, may occur, so that he may take his money to equip soldiers.

II. Gaunt dies. Richard seizes his estate (lawfully the property of Bolingbroke) and proceeds upon his Irish war. Bolingbroke lands from exile to claim his father's estate and t.i.tle. Richard's Welsh forces grow weary of waiting for their king. They disband themselves.

III. Bolingbroke's party prospers. Richard is taken and deposed.

IV. Bolingbroke makes himself king.

V. Richard, after sorrowing alone, and inspiring a hopeless attempt at restoration, is killed, desperately fighting, at Pomfret.

Treachery in some form is at the root of all Shakespearean tragedy. In this play it takes many forms, among which two are princ.i.p.al, the treachery of a king to his duty as a king, and the treachery of a subject to his duty as a subject. As usual in Shakespearean tragedy, the play is filled full by the abundant mind of the author with ill.u.s.trations of his idea. The apric.o.c.ks at Langley are like King Richard, the sprays of the trees like Bolingbroke, the weeds like the King's friends. Everybody in the play (even the horse in the last act) is in pa.s.sionate relation to the central idea.

King Richard is of a type very interesting to Shakespeare. He is wilful, complex, pa.s.sionate, with a beauty almost childish and a love of pleasure that makes him greedy of all gay, light, glittering things. He loves the music that does not trouble with pa.s.sion and the thought not touched with the world. He loves that kind of false, delicate beauty which is made in societies where life is too easy. There is much that is beautiful in him. He has all the charm of those whom the world calls the worthless. His love is a woman, as beautiful and unreal as himself. He fails because, like other rare things, he is not common. The world cares little for the rare and the interesting. The world calls for the rough and common virtue that guides a plough in a furrow, and sergeantly chaffs by the camp fires. The soul that suffers more than other souls is little regarded here. The tragedy of the sensitive soul, always acute, becomes terrible when that soul is made king here by one of the accidents of life. As a king, Richard neglects his duties with that kind of wilfulness which the world never fails to punish. The wilfulness takes the form of a shutting of the eyes to all that is truly kingly. He rebukes devotion to duty by banishing Bolingbroke, who tries to rid him of a traitor. He rebukes old age and wisdom in the truly great person of old John of Gaunt. Worst, and most unkingly of all, he is incapable of seeing and rewarding the large generosity of mind that makes sacrifices for an idea. Richard, who likes beautiful things, cannot see the beauty of old, rough, dying Gaunt, who condemns his own son to exile rather than betray his idea of justice. Bolingbroke, who cares intensely for nothing but justice (and could not give even that caring a name, if questioned), is deeply and n.o.bly generous to York, who would condemn his own son, and to the Bishop of Carlisle, who would die rather than not speak his mind. Men who sacrifice themselves are a king's only props.

Richard allies himself with men who prefer to sacrifice the country.

It is a proof of the greatness of Shakespeare's vision, that Richard is presented to us both as the traitor and the betrayed. He is the anointed king false to his coronation oaths; he is the anointed king deposed by traitors. He is not fitted for kingship, but life has made him a king.

Life, quite as much as temperament, is to blame for his tragedy. When life and temperament have thrust him from kingship, this wilful, pa.s.sionate man, so greedy and heady in his hurry to be unjust, is unlike the monster that office made him. He is no monster then, but a man, not even a man like ourselves, but a man of singular delicacy of mind, sensitive, strangely winning, who wrings our hearts with pity by his sense of his tragedy--

"And here have I the daintiness of ear To check time broke in a disorder'd string; But for the concord of my state and time Had not an ear to hear my true time broke."

Part of his tragedy is due to his being too late. Had he landed from Ireland one day earlier he would have found a force of Welshmen ready to fight for him. At the end of the play he discovers, too late, that he is weary of patience. He strikes out like a man, when he has no longer a friend to strike with him. He is killed by a man who finds, too late, that the murder was not Bolingbroke's intention.

As in all the tragedies, there is much n.o.ble poetry. John of Gaunt's speech about England is often quoted. Shakespeare's mind is our triumph, not a dozen lines of rhetoric. Less well known are the couplets--

"My inch of taper will be burnt and done, And blindfold death not let me see my son."

and

" ... let him not come there, To seek out sorrow that dwells everywhere."

Those scenes in the last acts which display the mind of the deposed king are all exquisite, though their beauty is not obvious to the many. There is a kind of intensity of the soul, so intense that it is obscure to the many till it is interpreted. Writers of plays know well how tamely words intensely felt may read. They know, too, how like fire upon many souls those words will be when the voice and the action give them their interpretation. _Richard II_, like other plays of spiritual tragedy, needs interpretation. When he wrote it, Shakespeare had not wholly the power that afterwards he achieved, of himself interpreting his vision by many-coloured images. It is not one of the beloved plays.

Bolingbroke has been praised as a manly Englishman, who is not "weak"

like Richard, but "strong" and a man of deeds. In Act IV he shows his English kindness of mind and love of justice by a temperate wisdom in the trying of a cause and by saying that he will call back from exile his old enemy Norfolk. The Bishop of Carlisle tells him that that cannot be. Norfolk having worn himself out in the wars in Palestine has retired himself to Italy, and there, at Venice, given

"His body to that pleasant country's earth, And his pure soul unto his captain Christ, Under whose colours he had fought so long."

It is instructive to note how Bolingbroke takes the news--

_Bol._ Why, bishop, is Norfolk dead?

_Carl._ As surely as I live, my lord.

_Bol._ Sweet peace conduct his sweet soul to the bosom Of good old Abraham. Lords appellants, Your differences, etc.

The feeling that the poet's mind saw the clash as the clash between the common and the uncommon man is strengthened by the Queen's speech to Richard as he is led to prison--

"thou most beauteous inn, Why should hard-favour'd grief be lodged in thee, When triumph is become an alehouse guest?"

_King Richard III._

_Written._ 1594 (?)

_Published._ 1597.

_Source of the Plot._ The play is founded on the lives of Edward IV, Edward V, and Richard III, as given (on the authorities of Edward Hall and Sir Thomas More) in Holinshed's _Chronicles_.

Shakespeare may have seen a worthless play (_The True Tragedy of Richard III_) which was published in 1594, by an unknown author.

_The Fable._ Act I. The play begins in the last days of King Edward IV, when the King's two brothers, Clarence and Gloucester, are debating who shall succeed to the throne when the King dies. In the first scene Clarence is led to the Tower under suspicion of plotting to succeed. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the cause of the committal, pretends to grieve for him, but hastens to compa.s.s his death. In the next scene Richard woos the Lady Anne (widow of the dead son of Henry VI, and daughter of the Earl of Warwick), who is likely to be useful to him for the moment as an ally (she being of the house of Lancaster). The third scene displays the pa.s.sionate quarrelling of the Court factions. The Queen, her brothers and Richard's party, are cursed by Margaret of Anjou. In the fourth scene Clarence is murdered in the Tower.

Act II. King Edward IV dies, having patched up a seeming truce between the factions. His son is to succeed him. Before this can happen, Richard strikes down the leaders of the Queen's party, and lays a deep scheme to secure the crown for himself.

Act III. There is a deeply tragical scene in which the unsuspecting Hastings, who is faithful to Edward's memory, is hurried out of life. Afterwards, through the management of Buckingham, Richard is proclaimed King.

Act IV. Richard makes himself sure by casting off Buckingham and causing the murder of Edward's sons in the Tower. He plots to marry Edward's daughter. But by this time the land is in upheaval against him. Buckingham and Richmond lead forces against him.

Act V. Buckingham is taken and put to death; but Richmond's forces gather head. Richard leads his army to oppose them. The armies front each other at Bosworth Field near Leicester. The night before the battle the ghosts of the many slain during the progress of the Wars of the Roses menace Richard and promise victory to Richmond.

In the battle that follows Richard is slain. Richmond takes oath to end the Wars of the Roses by marrying Edward's daughter, so that the two royal houses may at last be joined.

_Richard III_ is the last of the great historical plays about the Wars of the Roses. The subject of the wars had occupied Shakespeare's mind for many months. He had traced them from their beginning in the long ago to their end among the dead at Bosworth. All that bloodiness of misery was due to a forgotten marriage and the chance that Edward III had seven sons, the eldest of whom died before his father. In this great tragic vision Shakespeare saw the wheel come full circle, with that giving of justice which life renders at last, though it may be to the dead, or the mad, or the broken.

Largely, this play deals with the coming of that justice. Much that is most wonderful in the play comes from the faith that blood cruelly or unjustly spilt cries from the ground, and that the human soul, wrought to an ecstasy, has power, as the blood has power, to draw G.o.d's hand upon the guilty. But Shakespeare's mind was also occupied with the knowledge that self-confident intellect is terrible and tragical. One of the truths of the play is the very sad one that being certain is in itself a kind of sin, sure to be avenged by life. The obsession of self-confidence betrays person after person, to misery or death. All the heads that lift themselves proudly go b.l.o.o.d.y to the dust or bow in anguish. Only one man moves by other light than his own. He is the only one who achieves quiet triumph. Nothing in the play is more impressive than the speech in which the intellect that has ended the bloodshed prays humbly that G.o.d may bless and help England with peace.

It was said of Napoleon that he was as great as a man can be without virtue. The intellect of Richard III is like that of Napoleon. It is restless, swift, and sure of its power. It is sure, too, that the world stays as it is from something stupid in the milky human feelings.

Richard is a "b.l.o.o.d.y dog" let loose in a sheep-fold. It is a part of the tragedy that he is n.o.bler than the sheep that he destroys. His is the one great intellect in the play. Intellect is always rare. In kings it is very rare. When a great intellect is made bitter by being cased in deformity one has the tragedy of intellect turned upon itself. Had Richard been born without his deformed shoulder he could have known human sympathy, and human intercourse. Without human intercourse he goes gloating, clutching himself, biting his lip, muttering at the twist in his shadow. This warped, starved mind knows himself stronger than the minds near him. It is tragical to be deformed, it is tragical to have an intellect too great for people to understand. But the deformed and bitter intellect would suffer tragedy indeed if he, the one constant Yorkist, were to be ruled by a gentle, half-witted Lancastrian saint like Henry VI, or by Clarence the perjurer, or by the upstart Woodville, a commoner made n.o.ble because his sister took the King's fancy, or by the Queen herself, the housewife who caused great Warwick's death, or by one of her sons, who are pert to the man who had spilt his blood to make their father king. The snarling intellect bites rather than suffer that.

It is very terrible, but how if he had not bitten? The vision of all this bloodiness is less terrible than that vision of the sheep triumphing, so dear to us moderns--

"Strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill."