That which in mean men we entitle patience
Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts.
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!
A little little grave, an obscure grave!--
his religious appeal in the last reserve, with its bold reference to
the judgment of Pilate, as he thinks once more of his "anointing."
And as happens with children he attains contentment finally in the
merely passive recognition of superior strength, in the naturalness of
the result of the great battle as a matter of course, and experiences
something of the royal prerogative of poetry to obscure, or at least to
attune and soften men's griefs. As in some sweet anthem of Handel, the
sufferer, who put finger to the organ under the utmost pressure of
mental conflict, extracts a kind of peace at last from the mere skill
with which he sets his distress to music.--
Beshrew thee, Cousin, that didst lead me forth
Of that sweet way I was in to despair!
[201] "With Cain go wander through the shades of night!" cries the new
king to the gaoler Exton, dissimulating his share in the murder he is
thought to have suggested; and in truth there is something of the
murdered Abel about Shakespeare's Richard. The fact seems to be that
he died of "waste and a broken heart:" it was by way of proof that his
end had been a natural one that, stifling a real fear of the face, the
face of Richard, on men's minds, with the added pleading now of all
dead faces, Henry exposed the corpse to general view; and Shakespeare,
in bringing it on the stage, in the last scene of his play, does but
follow out the motive with which he has emphasised Richard's physical
beauty all through it--that "most beauteous inn," as the Queen says
quaintly, meeting him on the way to death--residence, then soon to be
deserted, of that wayward, frenzied, but withal so affectionate soul.
Though the body did not go to Westminster immediately, his tomb,
That small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones,*
the effigy clasping the hand of his youthful consort, was already
prepared there, with "rich [202] gilding and ornaments," monument of
poetic regret, for Queen Anne of Bohemia, not of course the "Queen" of
Shakespeare, who however seems to have transferred to this second wife
something of Richard's wildly proclaimed affection for the first. In
this way, through the connecting link of that sacred spot, our thoughts
once more associate Richard's two fallacious prerogatives, his personal
beauty and his "anointing."
According to Johnson, Richard the Second is one of those plays which
Shakespeare has "apparently revised;" and how doubly delightful
Shakespeare is where he seems to have revised! "Would that he had
blotted a thousand"--a thousand hasty phrases, we may venture once more
to say with his earlier critic, now that the tiresome German
superstition has passed away which challenged us to a dogmatic faith in
the plenary verbal inspiration of every one of Shakespeare's clowns.
Like some melodiously contending anthem of Handle's, I said, of
Richard's meek "undoing" of himself in the mirror-scene; and, in fact,
the play of Richard the Second does, like a musical composition,
possess a certain concentration of all its parts, a simple continuity,
an evenness in execution, which are rare in the great dramatist. With
Romeo and Juliet, that perfect symphony (symphony of three independent
poetic forms set in a grander one* which it is the merit of German
[203] criticism to have detected) it belongs to a small group of plays,
where, by happy birth and consistent evolution, dramatic form
approaches to something like the unity of a lyrical ballad, a lyric, a
song, a single strain of music. Which sort of poetry we are to account
the highest, is perhaps a barren question. Yet if, in art generally,
unity of impression is a note of what is perfect, then lyric poetry,
which in spite of complex structure often preserves the unity of a
single passionate ejaculation, would rank higher than dramatic poetry,
where, especially to the reader, as distinguished from the spectator
assisting at a theatrical performance, there must always be a sense of
the effort necessary to keep the various parts from flying asunder, a
sense of imperfect continuity, such as the older criticism vainly
sought to obviate by the rule of the dramatic "unities." It follows
that a play attains artistic perfection just in proportion as it
approaches that unity of lyrical effect, as if a song or ballad were
still lying at the root of it, all the various expression of the
conflict of character and circumstance falling at last into the compass
of a single melody, or musical theme. As, historically, the earliest
classic drama arose out of the chorus, from which this or that person,
this or that episode, detached itself, so, into the unity of a choric
song the perfect drama ever tends to return, its intellectual scope
deepened, complicated, enlarged, but still with an unmistakable [204]
singleness, or identity, in its impression on the mind. Just there, in
that vivid single impression left on the mind when all is over, not in
any mechanical limitation of time and place, is the secret of the
"unities"--the true imaginative unity--of the drama.
1889.