RICHARD III may be considered as properly a stageplay: it belongs to
the theatre, rather than to the closet. We shall therefore criticize
it chiefly with a reference to the manner in which we have seen it
performed. It is the character in which Garrick came out: it was the
second character in which Mr. Kean appeared, and in which he
acquired his fame. Shakespeare we have always with us: actors we
have only for a few seasons; and therefore some account of them may
be acceptable, if not to our cotemporaries, to those who come after
us, if 'that rich and idle personage, Posterity', should deign to
look into our writings.
It is possible to form a higher conception of the character of
Richard than that given by Mr. Kean: but we cannot imagine any
character represented with greater distinctness and precision, more
perfectly ARTICULATED in every part. Perhaps indeed there is too
much of what is technically called execution. When we first saw this
celebrated actor in the part, we thought he sometimes failed from an
exuberance of manner, and dissipated the impression of the general
character by the variety of his resources. To be complete, his
delineation of it should have more solidity, depth, sustained and
impassioned feeling, with somewhat less brilliancy, with fewer
glancing lights, pointed transitions, and pantomimic evolutions.
The Richard of Shakespeare 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
Shakespeare, 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.
If Mr. Kean does not entirely succeed in concentrating all the lines of
the character, as drawn by Shakespeare, he gives an animation, vigour,
and relief to the part which we have not seen equalled. He is more
refined than Cooke; more bold, varied, and original than Kemble in the
same character. In some parts he is deficient in dignity, and
particularly in the scenes of state business, he has by no means an air
of artificial authority. There is at times an aspiring elevation, an
enthusiastic rapture in his expectations of attaining the crown, and at
others a gloating expression of sullen delight, as if he already
clenched the bauble, and held it in his grasp. The courtship scene with
Lady Anne is an admirable exhibition of smooth and smiling villainy. The
progress of wily adulation, of encroaching humility, is finely marked by
his action, voice and eye. He seems, like the first Tempter, to approach
his prey, secure of the event, and as if success had smoothed his way
before him. The late Mr. Cooke's manner of representing this scene was
more vehement, hurried, and full of anxious uncertainty. This, though
more natural in general, was less in character in this particular
instance. Richard should woo less as a lover than as an actor--to show
his mental superiority, and power of making others the playthings of his
purposes. Mr. Kean's attitude in leaning against the side of the stage
before he comes forward to address Lady Anne, is one of the most
graceful and striking ever witnessed on the stage. It would do for
Titian to paint. The frequent and rapid transition of his voice from the
expression of the fiercest passion to the most familiar tones of
conversation was that which gave a peculiar grace of novelty to his
acting on his first appearance. This has been since imitated and
caricatured by others, and he himself uses the artifice more sparingly
than he did. His by-play is excellent. His manner of bidding his friends
'Good night', after pausing with the point of his sword drawn slowly
backward and forward on the ground, as if considering the plan of the
battle next day, is a particularly happy and natural thought. He gives
to the two last acts of the play the greatest animation and effect. He
fills every part of the stage; and makes up for the deficiency of his
person by what has been sometimes objected to as an excess of action.
The concluding scene in which he is killed by Richmond is the most
brilliant of the whole. He fights at last like one drunk with wounds;
and the attitude in which he stands with his hands stretched out, after
his sword is wrested from him, has a preternatural and terrific
grandeur, as if his will could not be disarmed, and the very phantoms of
his despair had power to kill.--Mr. Kean has since in a great measure
effaced the impression of his Richard III by the superior efforts of his
genius in Othello (his masterpiece), in the murder-scene in MACBETH, in
RICHARD II, in SIR GILES OVERREACH, and lastly in OROONOKO; but we still
like to look back to his first performance of this part, both because it
first assured his admirers of his future success, and because we bore
our feeble but, at that time, not useless testimony to the merits of
this very original actor, on which the town was considerably divided for
no other reason than because they WERE original.
The manner in which Shakespeare's plays have been generally altered
or rather mangled by modern mechanists, is a disgrace to the English
stage. The patch-work Richard III which is acted under the sanction
of his name, and which was manufactured by Cibber, is a striking
example of this remark.
The play itself is undoubtedly a very powerful effusion of
Shakespeare's genius. The ground-work of the character of Richard,
that mixture of intellectual vigour with moral depravity, in which
Shakespeare delighted to show his strength--gave full scope as well
as temptation to the exercise of his imagination. The character of
his hero is almost everywhere predominant, and marks its lurid track
throughout. The original play is, however, too long for
representation, and there are some few scenes which might be better
spared than preserved, and by omitting which it would remain a
complete whole. The only rule, indeed, for altering Shakespeare is
to retrench certain passages which may be considered either as
superfluous or obsolete, but not to add or transpose anything. The
arrangement and development of the story, and the mutual contrast
and combination of the dramatis personae, are in general as finely
managed as the development of the characters or the expression of
the passions.
This rule has not been adhered to in the present instance. Some of the
most important and striking passages in the principal character have
been omitted, to make room for idle and misplaced extracts from other
plays; the only intention of which seems to have been to make the
character of Richard as odious and disgusting as possible. It is
apparently for no other purpose than to make Gloucester stab King Henry
on the stage, that the fine abrupt introduction of the character in the
opening of the play is lost in the tedious whining morality of the
uxorious king (taken from another play);--we say TEDIOUS, because it
interrupts the business of the scene, and loses its beauty and effect by
having no intelligible connexion with the previous character of the
mild, well-meaning monarch. The passages which the unfortunate Henry has
to recite are beautiful and pathetic in themselves, but they have
nothing to do with the world that Richard has to 'bustle in'. In the
same spirit of vulgar caricature is the scene between Richard and Lady
Anne (when his wife) interpolated without any authority, merely to
gratify this favourite propensity to disgust and loathing. With the same
perverse consistency, Richard, after his last fatal struggle, is raised
up by some galvanic process, to utter the imprecation, without any
motive but pure malignity, which Shakespeare has so properly put into
the mouth of Northumberland on hearing of Percy's death. To make room
for these worse than needless additions, many of the most striking
passages in the real play have been omitted by the foppery and ignorance
of the prompt-book critics. We do not mean to insist merely on passages
which are fine as poetry and to the reader, such as Clarence's dream,
&c., but on those which are important to the understanding of the
character, and peculiarly adapted for stage-effect. We will give the
following as instances among several others. The first is the scene
where Richard enters abruptly to the queen and her friends to defend
himself:
Gloucester. They do me wrong, and I will not endure it.
Who are they that complain unto the king,
That I forsooth am stern, and love them not?
By holy Paul, they love his grace but lightly,
That fill his ears with such dissentious rumours:
Because I cannot flatter and look fair,
Smile in men's faces, smooth, deceive, and cog,
Duck with French nods, and apish courtesy,
I must be held a rancorous enemy.
Cannot a plain man live, and think no harm,
But thus his simple truth must be abus'd
With silken, sly, insinuating Jacks?
Gray. To whom in all this presence speaks your grace?
Gloucester. To thee, that hast nor honesty nor grace;
When have I injur'd thee, when done thee wrong?
Or thee? or thee? or any of your faction?
A plague upon you all!
Nothing can be more characteristic than the turbulent pretensions to
meekness and simplicity in this address. Again, the versatility and
adroitness of Richard is admirably described in the following
ironical conversation with Brakenbury:
Brakenbury. I beseech your graces both to pardon me.
His majesty hath straitly given in charge,
That no man shall have private conference,
Of what degree soever, with your brother.
Gloucester. E'en so, and please your worship, Brakenbury,
You may partake of anything we say:
We speak no treason, man--we say the king
Is wise and virtuous, and his noble queen
Well strook in years, fair, and not jealous.
We say that Shore's wife hath a pretty foot,
A cherry lip,
A bonny eye, a passing pleasing tongue;
That the queen's kindred are made gentlefolks.
How say you, sir? Can you deny all this?
Brakenbury. With this, my lord, myself have nought to do.
Gloucester. What, fellow, naught to do with mistress Shore?
I tell you, sir, he that doth naught with her,
Excepting one, were best to do it secretly alone.
Brakenbury. What one, my lord?
Gloucester. Her husband, knave--would'st thou betray me?
The feigned reconciliation of Gloucester with the queen's kinsmen is
also a masterpiece. One of the finest strokes in the play, and which
serves to show as much as anything the deep, plausible manners of
Richard, is the unsuspecting security of Hastings, at the very time
when the former is plotting his death, and when that very appearance
of cordiality and good-humour on which Hastings builds his
confidence arises from Richard's consciousness of having betrayed
him to his ruin. This, with the whole character of Hastings, is
omitted.
Perhaps the two most beautiful passages in the original play are the
farewell apostrophe of the queen to the Tower, where the children
are shut up from her, and Tyrrel's description of their death. We
will finish our quotations with them.
Queen. Stay, yet look back with me unto the Tower;
Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes,
Whom envy hath immured within your walls;
Rough cradle for such little pretty ones,
Rude, rugged nurse, old sullen play-fellow,
For tender princes! The other passage is the account of their
death by Tyrrel:
Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn
To do this piece of ruthless butchery,
Albeit they were flesh'd villains, bloody dogs,--
Wept like to children in their death's sad story:
O thus! quoth Dighton, lay the gentle babes;
Thus, thus, quoth Forrest, girdling one another
Within their innocent alabaster arms;
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,
And in that summer beauty kissed each other;
A book of prayers on their pillow lay,
Which once, quoth Forrest, almost changed my mind:
But oh the devil!--there the villain stopped;
When Dighton thus told on--we smothered
The most replenished sweet work of nature,
That from the prime creation ere she framed.
These are some of those wonderful bursts of feeling, done to the
life, to the very height of fancy and nature, which our Shakespeare
alone could give. We do not insist on the repetition of these last
passages as proper for the stage: we should indeed be loath to trust
them in the mouth of almost any actor: but we should wish them to be
retained in preference at least to the fantoccini exhibition of the
young princes, Edward and York, bandying childish wit with their
uncle.