speare enlists all our sympathy for Richard. Now, what is the reason of this right-about-face on the part of the poet?

It appears to me that Shakespeare began the play intending to present the vile and cruel Richard of tradition. But midway in the play he saw that there was no emotion, no pathos, to be got out of the traditional view. If Richard were a vile, scheming, heartless murderer, the loss of his crown and life would merely satisfy our sense of justice, but this outcome did not satisfy Shakespeare's desire for emotion, and particularly his desire for pathos,1 and accordingly he veers round, says nothing more of Richard's vileness, lays stress upon his weakness and sufferings, discovers, too, all manner of amiable qualities in him, and so draws pity from us for his dethronement and murder.

The curious thing is that while Shakespeare is depicting Richard's heartlessness, he does his work badly; the traits, as I have shown, are crudely extravagant and even contradictory; but when he paints Richard's gentleness and amiability, he works like a master, every touch is infallible: he is painting himself.

It was natural for Shakespeare to sympathize deeply with Richard; he was still young when he wrote the play, young enough to remember vividly how he himself had been led astray by loose companions, and this formed a bond between them. At this time of his life this was Shakespeare's favourite subject: he treated it again in "Henry IV.,” " which is at once the epilogue to “Richard II.,” and a com

1 In the last scene of the last act of "Lear," Albany says: "This judgement of the heavens, that makes us tremble Touches us not with pity."

panion picture to it; for the theme of both plays is the same-youth yielding to unworthy companions-though the treatment in the earlier play is incomparably feebler than it became in." King Henry IV." Bushy, Bagot, and Green, the favourites of Richard, are not painted as Shakespeare afterwards painted Falstaff and his followers. But partly because he had not yet attained to such objective treatment of character, Shakespeare identified himself peculiarly with Richard; and his painting of Richard is more intimate, more subtle, more self-revealing and pathetic than anything in "Henry IV."

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As I have already said, from the time when Richard appoints York as Regent, and leaves England, Shakespeare begins to think of himself as Richard, and from this moment to the end no one can help sympathizing with the unhappy King. At this point, too, the character-drawing becomes, of a sudden, excellent. When Richard lands in England, he is given speech after speech, and all he says and does afterwards throws light, it seems to me, on Shakespeare's own nature. Let us mark each trait. First of all Richard is intensely, frankly emotional: he weeps for joy" to be in England again; weeping, smiling,” he greets the earth of England, and is full of hope. "The thief, the traitor," Bolingbroke, will not dare to face the light of the sun; for "every man that Bolingbroke has in his pay," he cries exultantly, God hath given Richard a glorious angel; Heaven still guards the right." A moment later he hears from Salisbury that the Welshmen whom he had relied upon as allies are dispersed and fled. At once he becomes "pale and dead." From the height of pride and confidence he falls to utter hopelessness.

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"All souls that will be safe fly from my side; For time hath set a blot upon my pride."

Aumerle asks him to remember who he is, and at once he springs from dejection to confidence again, He cries:

"Awake, thou sluggard majesty! thou sleepest. Is not the king's name forty thousand names?

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 :

"Strives Bolingbroke to be as great as we?

Greater he shall not be; if he serve God
We'll serve him, too, and be his fellow so.
Revolt our subjects? that we cannot mend;
They break their faith to God, as well as us.
Cry woe, destruction, ruin, loss, decay;

The worst is death, and death will have his day."

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:

"O villains, vipers, damned without redemption!
Dogs, easily won to fawn on any man!
Snakes,"

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:

"For within the hollow crown,
That rounds the mortal temples of a king,
Keeps Death his court: and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene

To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh, which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable; and, humour'd thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin1

Bores through his castle wall, and-farewell, King!"

Let us take another two lines of this soliloquy:

"For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings."

In the second scene of the third act of "Titus Andronicus" we find Titus saying to his daughter:

"I'll to thy closet; and go read with thee Sad stories chancèd in the times of old."

Again, in the "Comedy of Errors," Ægeon tells us that his life was prolonged:

"To tell sad stories of my own mishaps."

The similarity of these passages shows that in the very spring of life and heyday of the blood Shake1 In Hamlet's famous soliloquy the pin is, a "bodkin."

speare 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:

This ague
fit of fear is over-blown,
An easy task it is to win our own."

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:

"Beshrew thee, cousin, which didst lead me forth
Of that sweet way I was in to despair!"

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:

"My master, God omnipotent,

Is mustering in his clouds, on our behalf,
Armies of pestilence."

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