Shakespeare's Richard Iii

I PROPOSE to say a few words on one of the plays usually attributed to Shakespeare, — a play in respect of which I find myself in the position of Peter Bell, seeing little more than an ordinary primrose where I ought, perhaps, to see the plant and flower of light; I mean the play of Richard III. Horace Walpole wrote Historic Doubts concerning the monarch himself, and I shall take leave to express some about the authorship of the drama that bears his name. I have no intention of applying to it a system of subjective criticism which I consider as untrustworthy as it is fascinating, and which I think has often been carried beyond its legitimate limits. But I believe it absolutely safe to say of Shakespeare that he never wrote deliberate nonsense, nor was knowingly guilty of defective metre; yet even tests like these I would apply with commendable modesty and hesitating reserve, conscious that the meaning of words, and still more the associations they call up, have changed since Shakespeare’s day; that the accentuation of some was variable, and that Shakespeare’s ear may very likely have been as delicate as his other senses. On the latter point, however, I may say in passing, of his versification, which is often used as a test for the period of his plays, that Coleridge, whose sense of harmony and melody was perhaps finer than that of any other modern poet, did not allow his own dramatic verse the same licenses, and I might almost say the same mystifications, which he esteems applicable in regulating or interpreting that of Shakespeare. This is certainly remarkable. For my own part, I am convinced that if we had Shakespeare’s plays as he wrote them, — and not as they have come down to us, deformed by the careless hurry of the copiers - out of parts, by the emendations of incompetent actors, and the mishearings of shorthand writers, — I am convinced that we should not find from one end of them to the other a demonstrably faulty verse or a passage obscure for any other reason than depth of thought or supersubtlety of phrase.

I know that in saying this I am laying myself open to the reproach of applying common sense to a subject which of all others demands uncommon sense for its adequate treatment, — demands perception as sensitive and divination as infallible as the operations of that creative force they attempt to measure are illusive and seemingly abnormal. But in attempting to answer a question like that I have suggested, I should be guided by considerations far less narrow. We cannot identify printed thoughts by the same minute comparisons that would serve to convict the handwriting of them. To smell the rose is surely quite otherwise convincing than to number its petals ; and in estimating that sum of qualities which we call character, we trust far more to general than to particular impressions. In guessing at the authorship of an anonymous book, like Southey’s Doctor or Bulwer’s Timon, while I might lay some stress on tricks of manner, I should be much less influenced by the fact that many passages were above or below the ordinary level of any author whom I suspected of writing it than by the fact that there was a single passage different in kind from his habitual tone. A man may surpass himself or fall short of himself, but he cannot change his nature. I would not be understood to mean that common sense is always or universally applicable in criticism,— Dr. Johnson’s treatment of Lycidas were a convincing instance to the contrary ; but I confess I find often more satisfactory guidance in the illuminated and illuminating common sense of a critic like Lessing, making sure of one landmark before he moved forward to the next, than in the metaphysical dark lanterns which some of his successors are in the habit of letting down into their own consciousness by way of enlightening ours. Certainly common sense will never suffice for the understanding or enjoyment of “those brave translunary things that the first poets had ; ” but it is at least a remarkably good prophylactic against mistaking a handsaw for a hawk.

What, then, is the nature of the general considerations which I think we ought to bear in mind in debating a question like this, the authenticity of one of Shakespeare’s plays ? First of all, and last of all, I should put style; not style in its narrow sense of mere verbal expression, for that may change and does change with the growth and training of the man, but in the sense of that something, more or less clearly definable, which is always and everywhere peculiar to the man, and either in kind or degree distinguishes him from all other men, — the kind of evidence which, for example, makes us sure that Swift wrote The Tale of a Tub and Scott The Antiquary, because nobody else could have done it. Incessu patuit dea, and there is a kind of gait which marks the mind as well as the body. But even if we took the word “style” in that narrower sense which would confine it to diction and turn of phrase, Shakespeare is equally incomparable. Coleridge, evidently using the word in this sense, tells us : “ There’s such divinity doth hedge our Shakespeare round that we cannot even imitate his style. I tried to imitate his manner in the Remorse, and when I had done I found I had been tracking Beaumont and Fletcher and Massinger instead. It is really very curious.” Greene, in a well-known passage, seems to have accused Shakespeare of plagiarism, and there are verses, sometimes even a succession of verses, of Greene himself, of Peele, and especially of Marlowe, which are comparable, so far as externals go, with Shakespeare’s own. Nor is this to be wondered at in men so nearly contemporary. In fact, I think it is evident that to a certain extent the two masters of versification who trained Shakespeare were Spenser and Marlowe. Some of Marlowe’s verses have the same trick of clinging in the ear as Shakespeare’s. There is, for instance, that famous description of Helen, or rather the exclamation of Faust when he first sees Helen: —

one verse of which, if I am not mistaken, lingered in Shakespeare’s ear. But the most characteristic phrases of Shakespeare imbed themselves in the very substance of the mind, and quiver, years after, in the memory like arrows that have just struck and still feel the impulse of the bow. And no whole scene of Shakespeare, even in his ’prentice days, could be mistaken for the work of any other man ; for give him room enough, and he is sure to betray himself by some quality which either is his alone, or his in such measure as none shared but he.

I am reminded of a remark of Professor Masson’s which struck me a good deal, — that one day, when tired with overwork, he took up Dante, and after reading in it for half an hour or so he shut the book and found himself saying to himself, “ Well, this is literature ! ” And I think that this may be applied constantly to the mature Shakespeare, and in a great measure to the young Shakespeare. Take a whole scene together, and there are sure to be passages in it of which we can say that they are really literature in that higher meaning of the word.

It is usual to divide the works of Shakespeare by periods, but it is not easy to do this with even an approach to precision unless we take the higher qualities of structure as a guide. As he matured, his plays became more and more organisms, and less and less mere successions of juxtaposed scenes, strung together on the thread of the plot. In assigning periods too positively, I fancy we are apt to be misled a little by the imperfect analogy of the sister art of painting, and by the first and second manners, as they are called, of its great masters. But manual dexterity is a thing of far slower acquisition than mastery of language or the knack of melodious versification. The fancy of young poets is apt to be superabundant. It is the imagination that ripens with the judgment, and asserts itself as the shaping power in a deeper sense than belongs to it as a mere maker of pictures when the eyes are shut. Young poets, especially if they are great poets, learn the art of verse early, and their poetical vocabulary sins rather by excess than defect. They can pick up and assimilate what is to their purpose with astonishing rapidity. The Canzoniere of Dante was, at least in part, written before he was twenty-five ; and Keats, dying younger than that, left behind him poems that astonish us as much by their maturity of style and their Attic grace of form as they take the ear captive by their music and the fancy by their opaline beauty of phrase. Shakespeare, surely, was as apt a scholar as Keats. Already in the Venus and Adonis we find verses quite as gracious in their interlacing movement, and as full, almost, of picturesque suggestion, as those of his maturer hand. For example : —

Shakespeare himself was pleased with these verses, for a famous speech of Prospero in The Tempest has these lines : —

I think it is interesting to find Shakespeare improving on a phrase of his own : it is something that nobody else could do. There is even greater excellence in the Sonnets, — “ Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” and many others. The thing in which we should naturally expect Shakespeare to grow more perfect by practice and observation would be knowledge of stage effect, and skill in presenting his subject in the most telling way.

It would be on the side of the dramatist, or of the playwright, perhaps I had better say, rather than on the side of the poet, that we should look for development. To him, as to Molière, his perfect knowledge of stage-business gave an enormous advantage. If he took a play in hand to remodel it for his company, it would be the experience of the actor much more than the genius of the poet that would be called into play. His work would lie in the direction probably of curtailment oftener than of enlargement; and though it is probable that in the immaturer plays attributed to him by Heming and Condell in their edition of 1623 a portion, greater or less, may be his, yet it is hard to believe that he can be called their author in anything like the same sense as we are sure he is the author of those works in which no other hand can be suspected, because no other hand has ever been capable of such mastery.

It must be remembered that we come to the reading of all the plays attributed to Shakespeare with the preconception that they are his. The juggler, if he wishes to give us the impression that a sound comes from a certain direction, long beforehand turns our attention that way, makes us expect it, and at last we hear it, thence. So this shows the immense power that a persuasion of this kind has over the imagination even in regard to a thing so physical as sound, and in things so metaphysical as the plays of Shakespeare it applies with even more force. If we take up a play thinking it is his, it is astonishing how many things we excuse and how many things we slur over, and so on, for various reasons not very satisfactory, I think, if strictly cross-examined. How easily a preconceived idea that a play is Shakespeare’s may mislead even clever and accomplished men into seeing what they expect to see is proved by the number of believers in Ireland’s clumsy forgery of Vortigern. It was precisely on the style, in its narrow sense of language and versification, that those too credulous persons based their judgment. The German poet and critic, Tieck, believed in the Shakespearean authorship of all the supposititious plays, and in regard to one of them, at least, The Yorkshire Tragedy, drew his arguments from the diction. Now, so far as mere words go, the dramatists of Shakespeare’s time all drew from the same common fund of vocables. The movement of their verse, so far as it was mechanical, would naturally have many points of resemblance.

As an example of the tests sometimes employed, and successfully, but which should not be too implicitly relied upon, I will mention that which is called the double-ending, where there is a superfluous syllable at the end of a line. This is a favorite and often tiresome trick of Fletcher’s. But Shakespeare also tried it now and then, as in the choruses of Henry V., which are among the finest examples of his merely picturesque writing.

It is possible that the external manner of Shakespeare might have been caught and imitated more or less unconsciously by some of his contemporaries, as it most certainly was in the next generation, notably by Webster and Shirley. Fletcher was almost Shakespeare’s equal in poetic sentiment; and Chapman rises sometimes nearly to his level in those exultations of passionate self-consciousness to which the protagonists of his tragedies are lifted in the supreme crisis of their fate. But Fletcher’s sentiment seems artificial in comparison, and his fancy never sings at heaven’s gate as Shakespeare’s so often does, and Chapman’s grandeur comes dangerously near to what a friend would call extravagance and an enemy bombast.² There is a certain dramatic passion in Shakespeare’s versification, too, which we find in no other of his coevals except Marlowe, and in him far less constantly. Detached verses, I believe, could be cited from far inferior men that might well pass as the handiwork of the great master so far as their merely poetical quality is concerned ; but what I mean by dramatic passion is that in Shakespeare’s best and most characteristic work the very verse is interpenetrated by what is going on in the mind of the speaker, and its movement hastened or retarded by his emotion rather than by the ear and choice of the poet. Yes, single verses, but of other men, might be taken for his, but no considerable sequence of them, and no one of his undoubted plays, taken as a whole, could ever by any possibility be supposed to be the creation of any other poet.

It is something very difficult to define, this impression which convinces us without argument and better than all argument, but it would win the verdict of whatever jury. If the play of Cymbeline had been lost, for example, and the manuscript were to be discovered tomorrow, who would doubt its authorship ? Nay, in this case there are short passages, single verses and phrases even, that bear the unmistakable mint-mark of him who alone could ascend the highest heaven of invention ; of that magician of whom Dryden said so truly, “ Within that circle none dare tread but he.” And it is really curious, I may say in passing, —that verse of Dryden reminds me of it, — that almost all the poets who have touched Shakespeare seem to become inspired above themselves. The poem that Ben Jonson wrote in his memory has a splendor of movement about it that is uncommon with him, — a sort of rapture ; and Dryden wrote nothing finer than what he wrote about the greatest of poets, nor is any other play of his comparable in quality with All for Love, composed under Shakespeare’s immediate and obvious influence.

There are three special considerations, three eminent and singular qualities of Shakespeare, which more than all or anything else, I think, set him in a different category from his contemporaries ; and it is these that I would apply as tests, not always or commonly, indeed, to single verses or scenes, but to the entire play. It has been said, with truth, of Byron that there is no great poet who so often falls below himself, and this is no doubt true, within narrower limits, of Shakespeare ; but I do not think it would be easy to find a whole scene in any of his acknowledged plays where his mind seems at dead low tide throughout, and lays bare its shallows and its ooze. The first of the three characteristics of which I have spoken is his incomparable force and delicacy of poetic expression, which can never keep themselves hidden for long, but flash out from time to time like those pulses of pale flame with which the sky throbs at unprophesiable intervals, as if in involuntary betrayal of the coming Northern Lights. Such gleams occur in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and still more frequently in A Midsummer Night’s Dream ; for here I choose my examples designedly from plays which are known to be early, and provably early, though it would be perfectly fair, since it is with natural and not acquired qualities that we are concerned, to pick them from any of his plays. Especially noteworthy, also, I think, are those passages in which a picturesque phrase is made the vehicle, as it were by accident, of some pregnant reflection or profound thought, as for instance, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Theseus says : —

In all his plays we have evidence that he could not long keep his mind from that kind of overflow. I think it is sometimes even a defect that he is apt to be turned out of his direct course by the first metaphysical quibble, if I may so call it, that pops up in his path.

One of the surest of these detective clues is this continual cropping - up (Goethe would have called it intrusion) of philosophical or metaphysical thought in the midst of picturesque imagery or passionate emotion, as if born of the very ecstasy of the language in which it is uttered. Take, for example, a passage from The Two Noble Kinsmen which has persuaded nearly all critics that Shakespeare had a hand in writing that play. It is Arcite’s invocation of Mars. Observe how it begins with picture, and then deepens down into a condensed statement of all the main arguments that can be urged in favor of war : The first impression made upon us by Richard III. is that it is thoroughly melodramatic in conception and execution. Whoever has seen it upon the stage knows that the actor of Richard is sure to offend against every canon of taste laid down by Hamlet in his advice to the players. He is sure to tear his passion to rags and tatters ; he is sure to split the ears of the groundlings ; and he is sure to overstep the modesty of nature with every one of his stage strides. Now it is not impossible that Shakespeare, as a caterer for the public taste, may have been willing that the groundlings as well as other people should help to fill the coffers of his company, and that the right kind of attraction should accordingly be offered them. It is therefore conceivable that he may have retouched or even added to a poor play which had already proved popular; but it is not conceivable that he should have written an entire play in violation of those principles of taste which we may deduce more or less clearly from everything he wrote.

The second characteristic of which I should expect to see some adumbration, at least, in any unmistakable work of Shakspeare would be humor, in which itself and in the quality of it he is perhaps more unspeakably superior to his contemporaries than in some other directions, — I mean in the power of pervading a character with humor, creating it out of humor, so to speak, and yet never overstepping the limits of nature or coarsening into caricature. In this no man is or ever was comparable with him but Cervantes. Of this humor we have something more than the premonition in some of his earliest plays.

A third characteristic of Shakespeare is eloquence; and this, of course, we expect to meet with, and do meet with, more abundantly in the historical and semi-historical plays than in those where the intrigue is more private and domestic. If I were called upon to name any one mark more distinctive than another of Shakespeare’s work, it would be this. I do not mean mere oratory, as in Antony’s speech over the body of Cæsar, but an eloquence of impassioned thought finding vent in vivid imagery. The speeches seem not to be composed, — they grow; thought budding out of thought, and image out of image, by what seems a natural law of development, but by what is no doubt some subtler process of association in the speaker’s mind, always gathering force and impetuosity as it goes, from its own very motion. Take as examples the speeches of Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida.

I think these are the three qualities — subtlety of poetie expression, humor, and eloquence — which we should expect to find in a play of Shakespeare’s, and especially in an historical play. Of each and all of these we find less in Richard III., as it appears to me, than in any other of his plays of equal pretensions ; for although it is true that in Richard II. there is no humorous character, the humor of irony is many times present in the speeches of the king after his dethronement. There is a gleam of humor here and there in Richard III., as where Richard rebukes Buckingham for saying “ zounds,” —

and there are many other Shakespearean touches ; but the play as a whole appears to me always less than it should be, except in scenic effectiveness, to be reckoned a work from Shakespeare’s brain and hand alone, or even mainly, — less in all the qualities and dimensions that are most exclusively and characteristically his. This I think to be conclusive, for, as Goethe says very truly, if there be any defect in the most admirable of Shakespeare’s plays, it is that they are more than they should be. The same great critic, speaking of his Henry IV., says with equal truth “ that, were everything else that has come down to us of the same kind lost, [the arts of] poesy and rhetoric could be recreated out of it.”

Then, again, Shakespeare’s patriotism is characteristic of his plays. It is quite as intense as that of Burns ; and in a play dealing with a subject like that of Richard III. one would expect to see this patriotism show itself in a rather more pronounced manner than usual, because the battle of Bosworth Field, with which the play ends, ended also a long and tragic series of wars, and established on the throne the grandfather of the sovereign who was reigning when the play was put upon the stage. Now there is one allusion, a sort of prophetic allusion, in this play to the succession of Henry VII.’s descendants to the throne; but if you compare it with the admirable way in which Shakespeare — I grant that he was then older and his faculties more mature — has dealt with a similar matter in Macbeth, in the second scene with the witches, which impresses our imagination almost as much as it does that of the usurper himself; if we consider, moreover, that in the play of Richard III. there is an almost ludicrous procession of ghosts, — for there are eleven of them who pass through, speaking to Richard on the right and to Richmond on the left, — and if we compare this with Shakespeare’s treatment of the supernatural in any of his undoubted plays, I think we shall feel that the inferiority is not one of degree, but one of kind.

I cannot conceive how anybody should believe that Shakespeare wrote the two speeches which are made to their armies by Richard and Richmond respectively. That of Richard is by far the better, and has something of the true Shakespearean ring in it, something of his English scorn for the upstart and the foreigner, notably where he calls Richmond

but that of his antagonist falls ludicrously flat to shame his worshipers. Compare it with the speech of Henry V. under the walls of Harfleur, or his reply to Westmoreland. I can conceive almost anything of Shakespeare except his being dull through a speech of twenty lines. I do not think he is ever that. He may be hyperbolical ; he may be this, that, or the other; but whatever it is, his fault is not that he is dull. If it were not so late, I would read to you a passage from an earlier play, — the speech of Gaunt in King Richard II.; and I am glad to refer to this because it shows in part that eloquence and that intensity of patriotism which display themselves whenever they can find or make an opportunity.

If Shakespeare undertook to remodel an already existing piece, we should expect to find his hand in the opening scene, for in this his skill is always noticeable in arresting attention and exciting interest. Richard’s soliloquy at the beginning of the play may be his in part, though there is a clumsiness in Richard’s way of declaring himself a scoundrel and in the reasons he gives for being one which is helplessly ridiculous. He says : —

And yet in the very next scene he wooes and wins Anne, though both she and Elizabeth had told him very frankly that they knew he was a devil. It would be a mistake to compare this betraying of himself by Richard with the cynical and almost indecent frankness of Iago. Iago was an Italian of the Renaissance as Shakespeare might have divined him through that penetrating psychology of his; and I have been told that even now Italians who see Salvini’s version of Othello sympathize rather with Iago than with the Moor, whom they consider to be a dull-witted fellow, deserving the dupery of which he was the victim.

Nevertheless Richard III. is a most effective acting play. There are, certainly, what seem to be unmistakable traces of Shakespeare in some of the worst scenes, though I am not sure that if the play had been lost, and should be discovered in our day, this would pass without question. The soliloquy of Clarence can hardly be attributed to any other hand, and there are gleams from time to time that look like manifest records of his kindling touch. But the scolding mob of widow queens, who make their billingsgate more intolerable by putting it into bad blank verse, and the childish procession of eleven ghosts seem to me very little in Shakespeare’s style ; for in nothing, as I have said, is he more singular and preëminent than in his management of the supernatural.

I find that my time has got the better of me. I shall merely ask you to read Richard III. with attention, and with a comparison such as I have hinted at between this and other plays which are most nearly contemporary with it, and I therefore shall not trouble you with further passages.

It seems to me that an examination of Richard III. plainly indicates that it is a play which Shakespeare adapted to the stage, making additions, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter; and that towards the end, either growing weary of his work or pressed for time, he left the older author, whoever he was, pretty much to himself. It would be interesting to follow out minutely a question of this kind, but that would not be possible within the limits of an occasion like this. It will be enough if I have succeeded in interesting you to a certain extent in a kind of discussion that has at least the merit of withdrawing us for a brief hour from the more clamorous interests and questions of the day to topics which, if not so important, have also a perennial value of their own.

While I believe in the maintenance of classical learning in our universities, I never open my Shakespeare but I find myself wishing that there might be professorships established for the expounding of his works as there used to be for those of Dante in Italy. There is nothing in all literature so stimulating and suggestive as the thought he seems to drop by chance, as if his hands were too full; nothing so cheery as his humor ; nothing that laps us in Elysium so quickly as the lovely images which he marries to the music of his verse. He is also a great master of rhetoric in teaching us what to follow, and sometimes quite as usefully what to avoid. I value him above all for this: that for those who know no language but their own there is as much intellectual training to be got from the study of his works as from those of any, I had almost said all, of the great writers of antiquity.

James Russell Lowell.