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 class, 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 adventitious 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.