Aumerle asks him to remember who he is, and at once he springs from dejection to confidence again. He cries:
The next moment Scroop speaks of cares, and forthwith fitful Richard is in the dumps once more. But this time his weakness is turned to resignation and sadness, and the pathos of this is brought out by the poet:
Who does not hear Hamlet speaking in this memorable last line? Like Hamlet, too, this Richard is quick to suspect even his friends' loyalty. He guesses that Bagot, Bushy, and Green have made peace with Bolingbroke, and when Scroop seems to admit this, Richard is as quick as Hamlet to unpack his heart with words:
and so forth.
But as soon as he learns that his friends are dead he breaks out in a long lament for them which ranges over everything from worms to kings, and in its melancholy pessimism is the prototype of those meditations which Shakespeare has put in the mouth of nearly all his favourite characters. Who is not reminded of Hamlet's great monologue when he reads:
{Footnote 1: In Hamlet's famous soliloquy the pin is a “bodkin."}
Let us take another two lines of this soliloquy:
In the second scene of the third act of “Titus Andronicus” we find Titus saying to his daughter:
Again, in the “Comedy of Errors,” Ægeon tells us that his life was prolonged:
The similarity of these passages shows that in the very spring of life and heyday of the blood Shakespeare had in him a certain romantic melancholy which was developed later by the disappointments of life into the despairing of Macbeth and Lear.
When the Bishop calls upon Richard to act, the King's weathercock mind veers round again, and he cries:
But when Scroop tells him that York has joined with Bolingbroke, he believes him at once, gives up hope finally, and turns as if for comfort to his own melancholy fate:
That “sweet way” of despair is Romeo's way, Hamlet's, Macbeth's and Shakespeare's way.
In the next scene Richard meets his foes, and at first plays the king. Shakespeare tells us that he looks like a king, that his eyes are as “bright as an eagle's”; and this poetic admiration of state and place seems to have got into Richard's blood, for at first he declares that Bolingbroke is guilty of treason, and asserts that:
Of course, he gives in with fair words the next moment, and the next rages against Bolingbroke; and then comes the great speech in which the poet reveals himself so ingenuously that at the end of it the King he pretends to be, has to admit that he has talked but idly. I cannot help transcribing the whole of the passage, for it shows how easily Shakespeare falls out of this King's character into his own:
Every one will admit that the poet himself speaks here, at least, from the words “I'll give my jewels” to the words “Would not this ill do well?” But the melancholy mood, the pathetic acceptance of the inevitable, the tender poetic embroidery now suit the King who is fashioned in the poet's likeness.
The next moment Richard revolts once more against his fate:
And when Bolingbroke kneels to him he plays upon words, as Gaunt did a little earlier in the play misery making sport to mock itself. He says:
and then he abandons himself to do “what force will have us do.”
The Queen's wretchedness is next used to heighten our sympathy with Richard, and immediately afterwards we have that curious scene between the gardener and his servant which is merely youthful Shakespeare, for such a gardener and such a servant never yet existed. The scene {Footnote: Coleridge gives this scene as an instance of Shakespeare's “wonderful judgement”; the introduction of the gardener, he says, “realizes the thing,” and, indeed, the introduction of a gardener would have this tendency, but not the introduction of this pompous, priggish philosopher togged out in old Adam's likeness. Here is the way this gardener criticises the King:
Richard answers:
When he is asked to confess his sins in public, he moves us all to pity:
His eyes are too full of tears to read his own faults, and sympathy brings tears to our eyes also. Richard calls for a glass wherein to see his sins, and we are reminded of Hamlet, who advises the players to hold the mirror up to nature. He jests with his grief, too, in quick-witted retort, as Hamlet jests:
Hamlet touches the self-same note:
In the fifth act, the scene between the Queen and Richard is used simply to move our pity. She says he is “most beauteous,” but all too mild, and he answers her:
He bids her take,
and for her consolation he turns again to the telling of romantic melancholy stories:
I cannot copy this passage without drawing attention to the haunting music of the third line.
The scene in which York betrays his son to Bolingbroke and prays the king not to pardon but “cut off” the offending member, is merely a proof, if proof were wanted, of Shakespeare's admiration of kingship and loyalty, which in youth, at least, often led him to silliest extravagance.
The dungeon scene and Richard's monologue in it are as characteristic of Shakespeare as the similar scene in “Cymbeline” and the soliloquy of Posthumus:
Here we have the philosopher playing with his own thoughts; but soon the Hamlet-melancholy comes to tune the meditation to sadness, and Shakespeare speaks to us directly:
Later, one hears Kent's lament for Lear in Richard's words:
To Richard music is “sweet music,” as it is to all the characters that are merely Shakespeare's masks, and the scene in which Hamlet asks Guildenstern to “play upon the pipe” is prefigured for us in Richard's self-reproach:
In the last three lines of this monologue which I am now about to quote, I can hear Shakespeare speaking as plainly as he spoke in Arthur's appeals; the feminine longing for love is the unmistakable note:
And at the last, by killing the servant who assaults him, this Richard shows that he has the “something desperate” in him of which Hamlet boasted.
The murderer's praise that this irresolute-weak and loving Richard is “as full of valour as of royal blood” is nothing more than an excellent instance of Shakespeare's self-illusion. He comes nearer the fact in “Measure for Measure,” where the Duke, his other self, is shown to be “an unhurtful opposite” too gentle-kind to remember an injury or punish the offender, and he rings the bell at truth's centre when, in “Julius Caesar,” his mask Brutus admits that he
If a hasty blow were proof of valour then Walter Scott's Eachin in “The Fair Maid of Perth” would be called brave. But courage to be worth the name must be founded on stubborn resolution, and all Shakespeare's incarnations, and in especial this Richard, are as unstable as water.
The whole play is summed up in York's pathetic description of Richard's entrance into London:
This passage it seems to me both in manner and matter is as truly characteristic of Shakespeare as any that can be found in all his works: his loving pity for the fallen, his passionate sympathy with “gentle sorrow” were never more perfectly expressed.
Pity, indeed, is the note of the tragedy, as it was in the Arthur-scenes in “King John,” but the knowledge of Shakespeare derived from “King John” is greatly widened by the study of “King Richard II.” In the Arthur of “King John” we found Shakespeare's exquisite pity for weakness, his sympathy with suffering, and, more than all, his girlish-tender love and desire of love. In “Richard II.,” the weakness Shakespeare pities is not physical weakness, but mental irresolution and incapacity for action, and these Hamlet-weaknesses are accompanied by a habit of philosophic thought, and are enlivened by a nimble wit and great lyrical power. In Arthur Shakespeare is bent on revealing his qualities of heart, and in “Richard II.” his qualities of mind, and that these two are but parts of the same nature is proved by the fact that Arthur shows great quickness of apprehension and felicity of speech, while Richard once or twice at least displays a tenderness of heart and longing for love worthy of Arthur.
It appears then that Shakespeare's nature even in hot, reckless youth was most feminine and affectionate, and that even when dealing with histories and men of action he preferred to picture irresolution and weakness rather than strength, and felt more sympathy with failure than with success.
The conclusions we have already reached, will be borne out and strengthened in unexpected ways by the study of Hotspur—Shakespeare's master picture of the man of action. The setting sun of chivalry falling on certain figures threw gigantic shadows across Shakespeare's path, and of these figures no one deserved immortality better than Harry Percy. Though he is not introduced in “The Famous Victories of Henry V.,” the old play which gave Shakespeare his roistering Prince and the first faint hint of Falstaff, Harry Percy lived in story and in oral tradition. His nickname itself is sufficient evidence of the impression he had made on the popular fancy. And both Prince Henry when mocking him, and his wife when praising him, bear witness to what were, no doubt, the accepted peculiarities of his character. Hotspur lived in the memory of men, we may be sure, with thick, hasty speech, and hot, impatient temper, and it is easy, I think, even at this late date, to distinguish Shakespeare's touches on the traditional portrait. It is for the reader to say whether Shakespeare blurred the picture, or bettered it.
Hotspur's first words to the King in the first act are admirable; they bring the brusque, passionate soldier vividly before us; but I am sure Shakespeare had the fact from history or tradition.
Hotspur's picture of this “popinjay” with pouncet-box in hand, and “perfumed like a milliner,” is splendid self-revelation:
But immediately afterwards Hotspur's defence of Mortimer shows the poet Shakespeare rather than the rude soldier who hates nothing more than “mincing poetry.” The beginning is fairly good:
This “gentle Severn's sedgy bank” is too poetical for Hotspur; but what shall be said of his description of the river?
Shakespeare was still too young, too much in love with poetry to confine himself within the nature of Hotspur. But the character of Hotspur was so well known that Shakespeare could not long remain outside it. When the King cuts short the audience with the command to send back the prisoners, we find the passionate Hotspur again:
The last line strikes a false note; such a reflection throws cold water on the heat of passion, and that is not intended, for though reproved by his father Hotspur storms on:
The next long speech of Hotspur is mere poetic slush; he begins:
and goes on for thirty lines to reprove the conspirators for having put down “Richard, that sweet lovely rose,” and planted “this thorn, Bolingbroke.” This long speech retards the action, obscures the character of Hotspur, and only shows Shakespeare poetising without a flash of inspiration. Then comes Hotspur's famous speech about honour:
And immediately afterwards a speech in which his uncontrollable impatience and the childishness which always lurks in anger, find perfect expression. To soothe him, Worcester says he shall keep his prisoners; Hotspur bursts out:
No wonder Lord Worcester reproves him, and his father chides him as “a wasp-stung and impatient fool,” who will only talk and not listen. But again Hotspur breaks forth, and again his anger paints him to the life:
The very ecstasy of impatience and of puerile passionate temper has never been better rendered.
His soliloquy, too, in the beginning of scene iii, when he reads the letter which throws the cold light of reason on his enterprise, is excellent, though it repeats qualities we already knew in Hotspur, and does not reveal new ones:
But the topmost height of self-revealing is reached in the scene with his wife which immediately follows this. Lady Percy enters, and Hotspur greets her:
The lady's reply is too long and too poetical. Hotspur interrupts her by calling the servant and giving him orders. Then Lady Percy questions, and Hotspur avoids a direct answer, and little by little Shakespeare works himself into the characters till even Lady Percy lives for us:
It shows a certain immaturity of art that Hotspur should introduce the theme of “love,” and not Lady Percy; but, of course, Lady Percy seizes on the word:
All this is superb; Hotspur's coarse contempt of love deepens our sense of his soldier-like nature and eagerness for action; but though the qualities are rendered magically the qualities themselves are few: Shakespeare still harps upon Hotspur's impatience; but even a soldier is something more than hasty temper, and disdain of love's dalliance. But the portrait is not finished yet. The first scene in the third act between Hotspur and Glendower is on this same highest level; Hotspur's impatience of Glendower's bragging at length finds an unforgetable phrase:
Then Hotspur disputes over the division of England; he wants a larger share than that allotted to him; the trait is typical, excellent; but the next moment Shakespeare effaces it. As soon as Glendower yields, Hotspur cries:
This large generosity is a trait of Shakespeare and not of Hotspur; the poet cannot bear to lend his hero a tinge of meanness, or of avarice, and yet the character needs a heavy shadow or two, and no shadow could be more appropriate than this, for greed of land has always been a characteristic of the soldier-aristocrat.
Shakespeare is perfectly willing to depict Hotspur as scorning the arts. When Glendower praises poetry, Hotspur vows he'd “rather be a kitten and cry mew ... than a metre ballad-monger. ...” Nothing sets his teeth on edge “so much as mincing poetry”: and a little later he prefers the howling of a dog to music. When he is reproved by Lord Worcester for “defect of manners, want of government, ... pride, haughtiness, disdain,” his reply is most characteristic:
He is too old to learn, and his self-assurance is not to be shaken; but though he hates schooling he will school his wife:
This is merely a repetition of the trait shown in his first speech when he sneered at the popinjay-lord for talking in “holiday and lady terms.” But not only does Shakespeare repeat well-known traits in Hotspur, he also uses him as a mere mouthpiece again and again, as he used him at the beginning in the poetic description of the Severn. The fourth act opens with a speech of Hotspur to Douglas, which is curiously illustrative of this fault:
In the first five lines of this skimble-skamble stuff I hear Shakespeare speaking in his cheapest way; with the oath, however, he tries to get into the character again, and succeeds indifferently.
Immediately afterwards Hotspur is shocked by the news that his father is sick and has not even sent the promised assistance; struck to the heart by the betrayal, the hot soldier should now reveal his true character; one expects him to curse his father, and rising to the danger, to cry that he is stronger without traitors and faint-heart friends. But Shakespeare the philosopher is chiefly concerned with the effect of such news upon a rebel camp, and again he speaks through Hotspur:
Then Shakespeare pulls himself up and tries to get into Hotspur's character again by representing to himself the circumstance:
Shakespeare sees that he cannot go on exaggerating the injury—that is not Hotspur's line, is indeed utterly false to Hotspur's nature; and so he tries to stop himself and think of Hotspur:
After the first two lines, which Hotspur might have spoken, we have the sophistry of the thinker poetically expressed, and not one word from the hot, high-couraged soldier. Indeed, in the last four lines from the bookish “we read” to the end, we have the gentle poet in love with desperate extremities. The passage must be compared with Othello's—
But at length when Worcester adds fear to danger Hotspur half finds himself:
And this is all. The scene is designed, the situation constructed to show us Hotspur's courage: here, if anywhere, the hot blood should surprise us and make of danger the springboard of leaping hardihood. But this is the best Shakespeare can reach—this fainting, palefaced “Yet all goes well, yet all our joints are whole.” The inadequacy, the feebleness of the whole thing is astounding. Milton had not the courage of the soldier, but he had more than this: he found better words for his Satan after defeat than Shakespeare found for Hotspur before the battle:
When Shakespeare has to render Hotspur's impatience he does it superbly, when he has to render Hotspur's courage he fails lamentably.
“Tut, I came not to hear this.”
Hotspur admits the reproof, but immediately starts off again:
and so forth for twenty lines more, till Blount pulls him up again with the shrewd question:
Hotspur replies:
And yet this Hotspur who talks interminably when he would do much better to keep quiet, assures us a little later that he has not well “the gift of tongue,” and again declares he's glad a messenger has cut him short, for “I profess not talking.”
The truth is the real Hotspur did not talk much, but Shakespeare had the gift of the gab, if ever a man had, and Hotspur was a mouthpiece. It is worth noting that though the dramatist usually works himself into a character gradually, Hotspur is best presented in the earlier scenes: Shakespeare began the work with the Hotspur of history and tradition clear in his mind; but as he wrote he grew interested in Hotspur and identified himself too much with his hero, and so almost spoiled the portrait. This is well seen in Hotspur's end; Prince Henry has said he'd crop his budding honours and make a garland for himself out of them, and this is how the dying Hotspur answers him:
Of course, Prince Henry concludes the phrase, and continues the Hamlet-like philosophic soliloquy:
I have tried to do justice to this portrait of Hotspur, for Shakespeare never did a better picture of a man of action, indeed, as we shall soon see, he never did as well again. But take away from Hotspur the qualities given to him by history and tradition, the hasty temper, and thick stuttering speech, and contempt of women, and it will be seen how little Shakespeare added. He makes Hotspur hate “mincing poetry,” and then puts long poetic descriptions in his mouth; he paints the soldier despising “the gift of tongue” and forces him to talk historic and poetic slush in and out of season; he makes the aristocrat greedy and sets him quarrelling with his associates for more land, and the next moment, when the land is given him, Hotspur abandons it without further thought; he frames an occasion calculated to show off Hotspur's courage, and then allows him to talk faint-heartedly, and finally, when Hotspur should die mutely, or with a bitter curse, biting to the last, Shakespeare's Hotspur loses himself in mistimed philosophic reflection and poetic prediction. Yet such is Shakespeare's magic of expression that when he is revealing the qualities which Hotspur really did possess, he makes him live for us with such intensity of life that no number of false strokes can obliterate the impression. It is only the critic working sine ira et studio who will find this portrait blurred by the intrusion of the poet's personality.
It is the companion picture of Prince Henry that shows as in a glass Shakespeare's poverty of conception when he is dealing with the distinctively manly qualities. In order to judge the matter fairly we must remember that Shakespeare did not create Prince Henry any more than he created Hotspur. In the old play entitled “The Famous Victories of Henry V.,” and in the popular mouth, Shakespeare found roistering Prince Hal. The madcap Prince, like Harry Percy, was a creature of popular sympathy; his high spirits and extravagances, the vigorous way in which he had sown his wild oats, had taken the English fancy, the historic personage had been warmed to vivid life by the popular emotion.
Shakespeare was personally interested in this princely hero. As we have seen, he dims Hotspur's portrait by intrusion of his own peculiarities; and in the case of Harry Percy, this temptation will be stronger.
The subject of the play, a young man of noble gifts led astray by loose companions, was a favourite subject with Shakespeare at this time; he had treated it already in “Richard II.”; and he handled it here again with such zest that we are almost forced to believe in the tradition that Shakespeare himself in early youth had sown wild oats in unworthy company. Helped by a superb model, and in full sympathy with his theme, Shakespeare might be expected to paint a magnificent picture. But Prince Henry is anything but a great portrait; he is at first hardly more than a prig, and later a feeble and colourless replica of Hotspur. It is very curious that even in the comedy scenes with Falstaff Shakespeare has never taken the trouble to realize the Prince: he often lends him his own word-wit, and now and then his own high intelligence, but he never for a moment discovers to us the soul of his hero. He does not even tell us what pleasure Henry finds in living and carousing with Falstaff. Did the Prince choose his companions out of vanity, seeking in the Eastcheap tavern a court where he might throne it? Or was it the infinite humour of Falstaff which attracted him? Or did he break bounds merely out of high spirits, when bored by the foolish formalities of the palace? Shakespeare, one would have thought, would have given us the key to the mystery in the very first scene. But this scene, which paints Falstaff to the soul, tells us nothing of the Prince; but rather blurs a figure which everyone imagines he knows at least in outline. Prince Henry's first speech is excellent as description; Falstaff asks him the time of day; he replies:
This helps to depict Falstaff, but does not show us the Prince, for good-humoured contempt of Falstaff is universal; it has nothing individual and peculiar in it.
Then comes the speech in which the Prince talks of himself in Falstaff's strain as one of “the moon's men” who “resolutely snatch a purse of gold on Monday night,” and “most dissolutely spend it on Tuesday morning.” A little later he plays with Falstaff by asking: “Where shall we take a purse to-morrow, Jack?” It looks as if the Prince were ripe for worse than mischief. But when Falstaff wants to know if he will make one of the band to rob on Gadshill, he cries out, as if indignant and surprised:
He is only persuaded at length by Poins's proposal to rob the robbers. It may be said that these changes of the Prince are natural in the situation: but they are too sudden and unmotived; they are like the nodding of the mandarin's head—they have no meaning; and surely, after the Prince talks of himself as one of “the moon's men,” it would be more natural of him, when the direct proposal to rob is made, not to show indignant surprise, which seems forced or feigned; but to talk as if repenting a previous folly. The scene, in so far as the Prince is concerned, is badly conducted. When he yields to Poins and agrees to rob Falstaff, his words are: “Yea, but I doubt they will be too hard for us,”—a phrase which hardly shows wild spirits or high courage, or even the faculty of judging men, and the soliloquy which ends the scene lamely enough is not the Prince's, but Shakespeare's, and unfortunately Shakespeare the poet, and not Shakespeare the dramatist: